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

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.

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

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  1. Design for Just One Person? Investigation of personas in web design Alistair Edwards http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/~alistair

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

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

  4. A persona

  5. 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?’

  6. 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

  7. 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

  8. Emily

  9. Emily’s sites C B D A

  10. Kay

  11. Jin

  12. Thomas

  13. Jessica

  14. Results Do people consistently match personas to websites?

  15. Emily X2= 15.4737, df = 3, p = 0.001453

  16. Kay X2= 16.974, df = 3, p = 0.0007155

  17. Jin X2= 46.6316, df = 3, p = 4.163e-10

  18. Thomas X2= 23.4737, df = 3, p = 3.217e-05

  19. Jessica X2= 16.4211, df = 3, p = 0.0009294

  20. Results Do people consistently match personas to websites? Yes!

  21. 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

  22. Influence of pictures Thomas disability Jessica mood Emily age Kay gender Jin race Participants saw one of two pictures for each persona Each one manipulated one aspect of the persona’s appearance

  23. Emily Age

  24. Kay Gender (text was also manipulated)

  25. Jin Race

  26. Thomas Disability

  27. Jessica Mood

  28. Results Does the picture unduly influence people’s choices?

  29. Results

  30. Results

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

  32. Jin X2=7.6254, df=3, p=0.05442

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

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

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

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

  37. 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

  38. 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

  39. 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

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