Abstract
In the world of User Experience (UX), personas are tools that represent what designers learn during research into potential customers and a population that might use a product, website, service, or represent a brand. They also serve to help designers and engineering teams focus on user values, as well as understand possible user constraints and limitations [1]. This study asks the question “how related are designers to the personas they create?” UX designers create for an ever-changing world and increasingly diverse audiences. It is important to ensure that their personas reflect evolving consumer base demographics.
Our hypothesis grew out of studies discussing implications of innate human stereotyping behavior on the creation of personas [2]. However, to our knowledge, no previous studies directly examined how related UX design practitioners and the personas they create are. Turner and Turner [2] suggest, in their article “Is stereotyping inevitable when designing with personas?”, that we tend to display our biases in the form of stereotypes. Without examining these biases, designers may fail to create representative personas that demonstrate empathy for the user’s specific needs, values, and constraints, instead creating products around their own needs and vision [3].
Analyzing the data, we found most UX designers created personas that were closely related to themselves, with very little deviation from this norm. The sole exception was Black designers, who tended to produce a wider array of more diverse personas.
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Emmanuel, GS., Polito, F. (2022). How Related Are Designers to the Personas They Create?. In: Soares, M.M., Rosenzweig, E., Marcus, A. (eds) Design, User Experience, and Usability: Design Thinking and Practice in Contemporary and Emerging Technologies. HCII 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13323. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05906-3_1
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