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The Choice of a Persona: An Analysis of Why Stakeholders Choose a Given Persona for a Design Task

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HCI International 2023 – Late Breaking Papers (HCII 2023)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 14054))

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Abstract

Although personas have been applied for two decades, not much is known about why a designer chooses a specific persona for a given design task. This question matters because if designers prefer one persona over another, then the needs and attributes of that persona would be favored in the design process, resulting in possible “blind spots” and bias in regards to other personas. To explore reasons and behaviors associated with the choice of a persona, we conduct an on-site user study with 37 participants in a workplace setting focused on a social media content creation task. Our findings show that factors affecting the choice of persona include age similarity between the persona and the designer, persona’s looks, how many users the persona represents, time spent browsing the persona information, and whether the persona is (a)typical relative to other personas. Under different persona sets, these factors were correlated with the probability of a persona being chosen for a design task, and also supported by a qualitative analysis of the think-aloud records where the participants explained their persona choice. The findings provide implications for developing interaction techniques that support users’ varying information needs and persona selection strategies, including recommenders that would increase the match between the designers’ information needs and the available personas.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://spotify.design/article/the-story-of-spotify-personas.

  2. 2.

    https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/driving-adoption/driving-user-adoption-user-personas-and-user-journey-maps/m-p/82058.

  3. 3.

    https://developers.google.com/youtube/analytics.

  4. 4.

    https://www.dropbox.com/sh/gtuopopbqwgxjbw/AABPBK8KByeX2rvo3uOTsGNda?dl=0.

  5. 5.

    https://prolific.ac.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Marketing and Communication, University of Vaasa, Vaasa, Finland

    Joni Salminen

  2. College of Fine Arts, Illinois State University, Normal, IL, USA

    Sercan Şengün

  3. Instituto Universitário de Lisboa (ISCTE-IUL), Lisbon, Portugal

    João M. Santos

  4. Qatar Computing Research Institute, Hamad Bin Khalifa University, Doha, Qatar

    Soon-gyo Jung & Bernard Jansen

  5. IT University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Lene Nielsen

Authors
  1. Joni Salminen
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  2. Sercan Şengün
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  3. João M. Santos
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  4. Soon-gyo Jung
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  5. Lene Nielsen
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  6. Bernard Jansen
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Joni Salminen .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. The Open University of Japan, Chiba, Japan

    Masaaki Kurosu

  2. Hosei University, Tokyo, Japan

    Ayako Hashizume

  3. Aaron Marcus and Associates, Berkeley, CA, USA

    Aaron Marcus

  4. World Usability Day and Bubble Mountain Consulting, Newton Center, MA, USA

    Elizabeth Rosenzweig

  5. Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen, China

    Marcelo M. Soares

  6. Coventry University, Coventry, UK

    Don Harris

  7. Cranfield University, Cranfield, UK

    Wen-Chin Li

  8. Soar Technology Inc., Orlando, FL, USA

    Dylan D. Schmorrow

  9. Katmai Government Services, Orlando, FL, USA

    Cali M. Fidopiastis

  10. Tsinghua University, Beijing, China

    Pei-Luen Patrick Rau

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Salminen, J., Şengün, S., Santos, J.M., Jung, Sg., Nielsen, L., Jansen, B. (2023). The Choice of a Persona: An Analysis of Why Stakeholders Choose a Given Persona for a Design Task. In: Kurosu, M., et al. HCI International 2023 – Late Breaking Papers. HCII 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14054. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-48038-6_18

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-48038-6_18

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