Design for Just One Person? Investigation of personas in web design Alistair Edwards

Acknowledgement A project by Aiwen Tau, MSc HCIT student

Personas Invented by Alan Cooper The Inmates are Running the Asylum More in UCDE – and WEBD

A persona

Uses of personas Should be typical of intended users May require some research Enable designers to talk in concrete terms e.g. ‘That will be OK for Matthew when he’s at work, but at home he uses a dial-up connection, which will be slow. Maybe we need a stripped-down option for low bandwidth?’

Effectiveness of personas A attractive idea But how do we know they really work? Different users might have different perceptions of a persona and hence effectively be designing for different people

Aiwen’s experiment Create a website with 5 different personas For each persona show 4 different webpage designs Ask participants which page they think the persona would prefer

Emily

Emily’s sites A C BD

Kay

Jin

Thomas

Jessica

Results Do people consistently match personas to websites?

Emily X 2 = , df = 3, p =

Kay X 2 = , df = 3, p =

Jin X 2 = , df = 3, p = 4.163e-10

Thomas X 2 = , df = 3, p = 3.217e-05

Jessica X 2 = , df = 3, p =

Results Do people consistently match personas to websites? Yes!

Influence of pictures How important is the portrait? Might people be unduly influenced by the picture Matching to their impression of the picture, not the description? No guidance in the literature

Influence of pictures Participants saw one of two pictures for each persona Each one manipulated one aspect of the persona’s appearance EmilyageKaygenderJinrace ThomasdisabilityJessicamood

Emily Age

Kay Gender (text was also manipulated)

Jin Race

Thomas Disability

Jessica Mood

Results Does the picture unduly influence people’s choices?

Results

Does the picture unduly influence people’s choices? No none of the differences was significant Nearest to significance was Jin (race)

Jin X 2 =7.6254, df=3, p=

Results 1. Participants consistently match personas to websites Significant differences 2. They are not unduly influenced by the picture No significant differences

Participants 76 volunteers recruited by personal contacts and via the web But personas are used by designers Perhaps web designers are different?

Web developers 50 web developers were recruited to repeat the experiments Thanks to Dave Swallow

Results Distribution of matching personas to websites by web developers was not different to that of ‘ordinary people’

Discussion Scope is limited Matching personas to images of websites We were lucky Sites could not be targeted at either picture Some of the original participants might be web developers Investigating them was an afterthought Did not expect to recruit so many

Discussion There was an element of deception in the experiment Participants will be sent a copy of the report in which this will be revealled

Conclusions 1. People consistently match personas to websites 2. They are not unduly influenced by the picture 3. These results hold equally well for web developers and non-experts