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

journal contribution
submitted on 2024-04-17, 07:40 and posted on 2024-04-17, 07:41 authored by Joni Salminen, Soon-gyo Jung, Lene Nielsen, Sercan Şengün, Bernard J. Jansen

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.

Other Information

Published in: International Journal of Human-Computer Studies
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
See article on publisher's website: https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhcs.2022.102915

History

Language

  • English

Publisher

Elsevier

Publication Year

  • 2022

License statement

This Item is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Institution affiliated with

  • Hamad Bin Khalifa University
  • Qatar Computing Research Institute - HBKU

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