Boxes And Arrows : The Design Behind the Design

Article Idea:

research paper on the actual effectiveness of using personas

suggested by frank long on 2009/05/27

During the course of my literature review on the subject of personas, I found that despite the growing popularity of the methodology, comparatively little has been published on the subject (with the exception of Cooper and a small number of other practitioners), much of this has been written form a standpoint of advocacy or opposition – I found very little objective research.

During my review I came across a publication by Chapman and Milham (Microsoft). As you might be aware, they are sceptical about using personas. They call for more objective research in a number of different areas. One which caught my interest…

“Despite our scepticism about the Personas method, its efficacy is open to debate. There have been no adequate studies addressing the reliability, validity, or utility of the method. To rectify this, we suggest the following as potential idea sketches for future research.

(Point 4) Assign multiple teams to design the same product, where some teams use personas and some don’t. Which teams create products that are more usable?”

Chapman, C.N. and Milham, R. P. (2006). The persona’s new clothes: methodological and practical arguments against a popular method. Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society 50th Annual Meeting, p 635

I decided to do just that. I created an experiment that was conducted using students from the National College of Art and design. The students were given a brief to design a product; some were given personas while others were given the research that generated the personas. (All groups were working from the same information basis). I wanted to see what difference the personas would make. Would the product solutions be different? Which would be more useable? How would personas impact on the design process itself?

I also included a parallel study on the difference between communicating personas as photographic images V illustrations and using text based scenarios V storyboards.