Abstract
Empathy is seen as essential for user-centered design and thus needs to be taken into consideration in design education. Personas are a design method that is meant to promote empathy with users and are also used to foster an empathic design approach in educational settings. Empathic involvement is considered to be particularly important to overcome egocentric approaches in design, i.e. to relate to users that are dissimilar to the design team. We explored the use of personas as proxies of similar or dissimilar users in a classroom design project phase in a qualitative study of eight student design workshops with personas as user representations. We found that establishing whether a persona was similar or dissimilar to the students played an important role and lead to empathy gaps regarding users that were considered old or less technically inclined. Showing empathy in the student teams was considered risky and perspective taking was limited by the social interaction amongst the team members. We propose that research of design education would benefit from differentiating the multiple aspects that are typically conjoined in the term ‘empathy’. Furthermore raising awareness for the mechanisms of empathy should be incorporated into design and engineering education rather than relying on automatic reactions and intuition.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Adams, A., Lunt, P., & Cairns, P. (2008). A qualititative approach to HCI research. In P. Cairns & A. Cox (Eds.), Research methods for human–computer interaction (pp. 138–157). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Alicke, M. D., Dunning, D. A., & Krueger, J. (2005). The self in social judgment. New York: Psychology Press.
Ames, D. R. (2004a). Inside the mind reader’s tool kit: Projection and stereotyping in mental state inference. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 87(3), 340–353.
Ames, D. R. (2004b). Strategies for social inference: A similarity contingency model of projection and stereotyping in attribute prevalence estimates. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 87(5), 573–585.
Anvari, F., Richards, D., Hitchens, M., Babar, M. A., Tran, H. M. T., & Busch, P. (2017). An empirical investigation of the influence of persona with personality traits on conceptual design. Journal of Systems and Software, 134, 324–339.
Bardzell, J. (2014). Critical and cultural approaches to HCI. In S. Price, C. Jewitt, & B. Brown (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of digital technology research (pp. 130–143). London: Sage.
Bardzell, S., & Bardzell, J. (2011). Towards a feminist HCI methodology: Social science, feminism, and HCI. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on human factors in computing systems (CHI ‘11) (pp. 675–684).
Bath, C. (2014a). Diffractive design. In N. Marsden & U. Kempf (Eds.), Gender-UseIT—HCI, usability und UX unter Gendergesichtspunkten (pp. 27–36). München: De Gruyter Oldenbourg.
Bath, C. (2014b). Searching for methodology. Feminist technology design in computer science. In W. Ernst & I. Horwath (Eds.), Gender in science and technology (pp. 57–78). Bielefeld: Transcript.
Battarbee, K., & Koskinen, I. (2005). Co-experience: User experience as interaction. CoDesign, 1(1), 5–18.
Birch, S. A. J., & Bloom, P. (2004). Understanding children’s and adults’ limitations in mental state reasoning. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 8(6), 255–260.
Blanco, T., López-Forniés, I., & Zarazaga-Soria, F. J. (2017). Deconstructing the Tower of Babel: A design method to improve empathy and teamwork competences of informatics students. International Journal of Technology and Design Education, 27(2), 307–328.
Bornet, C., & Brangier, E. (2016). The effects of personas on creative codesign of work equipment: An exploratory study in a real setting. CoDesign, 12(4), 243–256.
Brown, T. (2009). Change by design—How design thinking transforms organizations and inspires innovation. New York: HarperCollins Publishers.
Cabrero, D. G., Winschiers-Theophilus, H., & Nocera, J. A. (2016). Re-conceptualising personas across cultures: Archetypes, stereotypes and collective personas in two locales in pastoral Namibia. In M. van der Velden, M. Strano, H. Hrachvec, J. Abdelnour Nocera, & C. Ess (Eds.), Culture, technology, communication: Common worlds, different futures? Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Culture, Technology, Communication. London, UK, 15–17 June 2016 (pp. 35–48).
Coll, M.-P., Viding, E., Rütgen, M., Silani, G., Lamm, C., Catmur, C., et al. (2017). Are we really measuring empathy? Proposal for a new measurement framework. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, 83, 132–139.
Converse, B. A., Lin, S., Keysar, B., & Epley, N. (2008). In the mood to get over yourself: Mood affects theory-of-mind use. Emotion, 8(5), 725–730.
Cooper, A., Reimann, R., Cronin, D., & Noessel, C. (2014). About face: The essentials of interaction design. New York: Wiley.
Cuff, B. M. P., Brown, S. J., Taylor, L., & Howat, D. J. (2014). Empathy: A review of the concept. Emotion Review, 8(2), 144–153.
Decety, J., & Sommerville, J. A. (2003). Shared representations between self and other: A social cognitive neuroscience view. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 7(12), 527–533.
Dresing, T., Pehl, T., & Schmieder, C. (2012). Manual (on) transcription: Transcription conventions, software guides and practical hints for qualitative researchers (3rd English Edition). Marburg. http://www.audiotranskription.de/english/transcription-practicalguide.htm. Accessed 21 April 2018.
Epley, N. (2004). A tale of tuned decks? Anchoring as accessibility and anchoring as adjustment. In D. J. Koehler & N. Harvey (Eds.), The Blackwell handbook of judgment and decision making (pp. 240–256). Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.
Epley, N. (2008). Solving the (real) other minds problem. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 2(3), 1455–1474.
Epley, N., & Caruso, E. M. (2008). Perspective taking: Misstepping into others’ shoes. In K. D. Markman, W. M. P. Klein, & J. A. Suhr (Eds.), Handbook of imagination and mental simulation (pp. 297–311). London: Taylor & Francis.
Epley, N., Keysar, B., Van Boven, L., & Gilovich, T. (2004a). Perspective taking as egocentric anchoring and adjustment. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 87(3), 327–339.
Epley, N., Morewedge, C. K., & Keysar, B. (2004b). Perspective taking in children and adults: Equivalent egocentrism but differential correction. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 40(6), 760–768.
Epley, N., & Waytz, A. (2010). Mind perception. In Handbook of social psychology.
Fenigstein, A., & Abrams, D. (1993). Self-attention and the egocentric assumption of shared perspectives. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 29(4), 287–303. https://doi.org/10.1006/jesp.1993.1013.
Flavell, J. H. (1992). Perspectives on perspective taking. In H. Beilin & P. B. Pufall (Eds.), Piaget’s theory: Prospects and possibilities (pp. 107–139). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Galinsky, A. D., Maddux, W. W., Gilin, D., & White, J. B. (2008). Why it pays to get inside the head of your opponent the differential effects of perspective taking and empathy in negotiations. Psychological Science, 19(4), 378–384.
Gasparini, A. (2015). Perspective and use of empathy in design thinking. In The eight international conference on advances in computer–human interactions (ACHI’15) (pp. 49–54).
Gehlbach, H., Marietta, G., King, A. M., Karutz, C., Bailenson, J. N., & Dede, C. (2015). Many ways to walk a mile in another’s moccasins: Type of social perspective taking and its effect on negotiation outcomes. Computers in Human Behavior, 52, 523–532.
Gray, C. M. (2016). It’s more of a mindset than a method”: UX practitioners’ conception of design methods. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on human factors in computing systems (CHI ‘16) (pp. 4044–4055).
Grudin, J. (2006). Why personas work: The psychological evidence. In J. Pruitt & T. Adlin (Eds.), The persona lifecycle, keeping people in mind throughout product design (pp. 642–663). San Francisco: Kaufmann Publisher.
Gutsell, J. N., & Inzlicht, M. (2012). Intergroup differences in the sharing of emotive states: Neural evidence of an empathy gap. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 7(5), 596–603.
Haag, M., Weber, C., Heim, J., Marsden, N. (2016). Geschlechterkonstruktionen in der Anforderungsspezifikation von IT-Projekten. In H. Barke, J. Siegeris, J. Freiheit & D. Krefting (Eds.), Gender und IT-Projekte - Neue Wege zu digitaler Teilhabe (pp. 61–70). Opladen: Budrich UniPress.
Hammond, M. M., & Kim, S. J. (2014). Rethinking empathy through literature (Vol. 31). London: Routledge.
Higgins, E. T. (1981). Role taking and social judgment: Alternative developmental perspectives and processes. In J. H. Flavell & L. Ross (Eds.), Social cognitive development: Frontiers and possible futures (pp. 119–153). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hill, C., Haag, M., Oleson, A., Mendez, C., Marsden, N., Sarma, A., & Burnett, M. (2017). Gender-Inclusiveness Personas vs. Stereotyping: Can we have it both ways? In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on human factors in computing systems (CHI ‘17) (pp. 6658–6671) http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3025453.3025609.
Hoch, S. J. (1987). Perceived consensus and predictive accuracy: The pros and cons of projection. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 53(2), 221–234.
Jolliffe, D., & Farrington, D. P. (2006). Development and validation of the Basic Empathy Scale. Journal of adolescence, 29(4), 589–611.
Kelley, C. M. (1999). Subjective experience as basis of “objective” judgments: Effects of past experience on judgments of difficulty. In D. Gopher & A. Koriat (Eds.), Attention and performance XVII: Cognitive regulation of performance: Interaction of theory and application (pp. 515–536). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Klein, K. J. K., & Hodges, S. D. (2001). Gender differences, motivation, and empathic accuracy: When it pays to understand. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 27(6), 720–730.
Kouprie, M., & Visser, F. S. (2009). A framework for empathy in design: Stepping into and out of the user’s life. Journal of Engineering Design, 20(5), 437–448.
Krueger, J. I. (2007). From social projection to social behaviour. European Review of Social Psychology, 18(1), 1–35.
LeRouge, C., Ma, J., Sneha, S., & Tolle, K. (2013). User profiles and personas in the design and development of consumer health technologies. International Journal of Medical Informatics, 82(11), e251–e268.
Lin, S., Keysar, B., & Epley, N. (2010). Reflexively mindblind: Using theory of mind to interpret behavior requires effortful attention. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 46(3), 551–556.
Lux, V., & Weigel, S. (2017). Empathy: Epistemic problems and cultural-historical perspectives of a cross-disciplinary concept. Berlin: Springer.
Marsden, N., & Haag, M. (2016). Stereotypes and politics: Reflections on Personas. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on human factors in computing systems (CHI ‘16) (pp. 4017–4031).
Mattelmäki, T., Vaajakallio, K., & Koskinen, I. (2014). What happened to empathic design? Design Issues, 30(1), 67–77.
Miaskiewicz, T., & Kozar, K. A. (2011). Personas and user-centered design: How can personas benefit product design processes? Design Studies, 32(5), 417–430.
Mitchell, J. P., Macrae, C. N., & Banaji, M. R. (2006). Dissociable medial prefrontal contributions to judgments of similar and dissimilar others. Neuron, 50(4), 655–663.
Monin, B. (2003). The warm glow heuristic: When liking leads to familiarity. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85(6), 1035–1048.
Nickerson, R. S. (1999). How we know—and sometimes misjudge—what others know: Imputing one’s own knowledge to others. Psychological Bulletin, 125(6), 737–759.
Nielsen, L. (2013). Personas—user focused design. Berlin: Springer.
Oudshoorn, N., Rommes, E., & Stienstra, M. (2004). Configuring the user as everybody: Gender and design cultures in information and communication technologies. Science, Technology and Human Values, 29(1), 30–63.
Preston, S. D., & Hofelich, A. J. (2012). The many faces of empathy: Parsing empathic phenomena through a proximate, dynamic-systems view of representing the other in the self. Emotion Review, 4(1), 24–33.
Rapanta, C., & Cantoni, L. (2014). Being in the users’ shoes: Anticipating experience while designing online courses. British Journal of Educational Technology, 45(5), 765–777.
Ritter, F. E., Baxter, G. D., & Churchill, E. F. (2014). Foundations for designing user-centered systems. London: Springer.
Royzman, E. B., Cassidy, K. W., & Baron, J. (2003). “ I know, you know”: Epistemic egocentrism in children and adults. Review of General Psychology, 7(1), 38–65.
Sassenrath, C., Sassenberg, K., & Scholl, A. (2014). From a distance… the impact of approach and avoidance motivational orientation on perspective taking. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 5(1), 18–26.
Smeenk, W., Tomico, O., & van Turnhout, K. (2016). A systematic analysis of mixed perspectives in empathic design: Not one perspective encompasses all. International Journal of Design, 10(2), 31–48.
Stephenson, B., & Wicklund, R. A. (1983). Self-directed attention and taking the other’s perspective. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 19(1), 58–77.
Thieme, A., Vines, J., Wallace, J., Clarke, R. E., Slovák, P., McCarthy, J., et al. (2014). Enabling empathy in health and care: Design methods and challenges. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on human factors in computing systems (CHI ‘14) (pp. 139–142).
Toombs, A., Gross, S., Bardzell, S., & Bardzell, J. (2017). From empathy to care: A feminist care ethics perspective on long-term researcher–participant relations. Interacting with Computers, 29(1), 45–57.
Tracey, M. W., & Hutchinson, A. (2016). Uncertainty, reflection, and designer identity development. Design Studies, 42, 86–109.
Wright, P., & McCarthy, J. (2008). Empathy and experience in HCI. Paper presented at the Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Florence.
Zajonc, R. B. (1968). Attitudinal effects of mere exposure. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 9(2p2), 1–27.
Zajonc, R. B. (1998). Emotions. In D. T. Gilbert, S. T. Fiske, & G. Lindzey (Eds.), The handbook of social psychology (4th ed., Vol. 1 and 2, pp. 591–632). New York: McGraw-Hill.
Zhang, X., & Wakkary, R. (2014). Understanding the role of designers’ personal experiences in interaction design practice. In Proceedings of the 2014 conference on designing interactive systems (DIS’14) (pp. 895–904).
Acknowledgements
This work was funded in part by the Brigitte-Schlieben-Lange-Programm/Ministry of Science, Research, and Arts Baden-Württemberg, Germany; and in part by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research, Germany (BMBF) for the project “IT&me—Konzeption, Umsetzung und Evaluation eines modellhaften multimedialen Wissenspools in der IT-Expertinnenbildung unter Berücksichtigung unterschiedlicher Lebenssituationen und Lernstrategien”, FKZ 01FP1617. The responsibility for the content lies with the authors. We appreciate the helpful comments provided by the anonymous reviewers.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Haag, M., Marsden, N. Exploring personas as a method to foster empathy in student IT design teams. Int J Technol Des Educ 29, 565–582 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10798-018-9452-5
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10798-018-9452-5