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

Alistair Edwards

http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/~alistair

Acknowledgement

A project by Aiwen Tau, MSc HCIT student 2011-12

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

B D

Kay

Jin

Thomas

Jessica

Results

Do people consistently match personas to websites?

Emily

X2 = 15.4737, df = 3, p = 0.001453

A B C D0%

5%

10%

15%

20%

25%

30%

35%

40%

45%

50%

Website

Kay

X2 = 16.974, df = 3, p = 0.0007155

A B C D0%

5%

10%

15%

20%

25%

30%

35%

40%

45%

Website

Jin

X2 = 46.6316, df = 3, p = 4.163e-10

A B C D0%

10%

20%

30%

40%

50%

60%

70%

Website

Thomas

X2 = 23.4737, df = 3, p = 3.217e-05

A B C D0%

5%

10%

15%

20%

25%

30%

35%

40%

45%

50%

Website

Jessica

X2 = 16.4211, df = 3, p = 0.0009294

A B C D0%

5%

10%

15%

20%

25%

30%

35%

40%

45%

Website

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 appearanceEmily

age

Kay

gender

Jin

race

Thomas

disability

Jessica

mood

Emily

Age

Kay

Gender (text was also manipulated)

Jin

Race

Thomas

Disability

Jessica

Mood

Results

Does the picture unduly influence people’s choices?

Results

A B C D0%

5%

10%

15%

20%

25%

30%

Emily

Picture 1

Picture 2

A B C D0%

5%

10%

15%

20%

25%

30%Kay

Picture 1

Picture 2

A B C D0%

5%

10%

15%

20%

25%

30%

35%

40%

Jin

Picture 1

Picture 2

A B C D0%

5%

10%

15%

20%

25%

Jessica

Picture 1

Picture 2

Results

A B C D0%

5%

10%

15%

20%

25%

30%

Thomas

Picture 1

Picture 2

Results

Does the picture unduly influence people’s choices?

No

none of the differences was significant

Nearest to significance was Jin (race)

Jin

A B C D0%

5%

10%

15%

20%

25%

30%

35%

40%

Jin

Picture 1

Picture 2

X2=7.6254, df=3, p=0.05442

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