How does varying the number of personas affect user perceptions and behavior? Challenging the ‘small personas’ hypothesis!

Studies in human-computer interaction recommend creating fewer than ten personas, based on stakeholders’ limitations to cognitively process and use personas. However, no existing studies offer empirical support for having fewer rather than more personas. Investigating this matter, thirty-seven participants interacted with five and fifteen personas using an interactive persona system, choosing one persona to design for. Our study results from eye-tracking and survey data suggest that when using interactive persona systems, the number of personas can be increased from the conventionally suggested ‘less than ten’, without significant negative effects on user perceptions or task performance, and with the positive effects of increasing engagement with the personas, having a more diverse representation of the end-user population, as well as users accessing personas from more varied demographic groups for a design task. Using the interactive persona system, users adjusted their information processing style by spending less time on each persona when presented with fifteen personas, while still absorbing a similar amount of information than with five personas, implying that more efficient information processing strategies are applied with more personas. The results highlight the importance of designing interactive persona systems to support users’ browsing of more personas.© 2022 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).fi=vertaisarvioitu|en=peerReviewed

Child-Generated Personas to Aid Design across Cultures

Designers frequently use personas to model potential users, but these personas need to be accurate portrayals of people. With personas needed to facilitate a cross-cultural participatory design project, it was recognized that the personas needed to not only describe children appropriately, but also capture differences in behaviours between cultures. 56 children aged 7-10 in the UK and India participated in the creation of personas of elementary school children, describing aspects such as school life, family life and technology use. A tool developed to evaluate personas demonstrated that both sets of children could individually create plausible personas, while content analysis of the personas demonstrated that children focused on behavioural and activity-based narratives that were similar between the two groups, with only limited cultural differences identified. The findings suggest that child-generated personas can be a viable method in the design process, and may offer insights that aid cross-cultural design