How Personas impact decision making in the design process — A Research Paper Review
Personas are often being used in the digital product design process to represent a set of users’ characteristics. A typical persona has a name, age, occupation, income, status, location, needs, frustrations, social media platform, and personality. For example, John is a student who is 21 years old. He makes about $800 a month at a convenience store as a part-time job. He is single now living in an apartment with a roommate in Oak Park, IL. He is on Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, and Instagram. He uses an iPhone 8. His hobby is photography, so he spends a lot of time exploring the city and shooting all the interesting subjects. He is an outgoing person, so he has a lot of friends. With this detailed information about John, designers are able to design products that aim for that particular group of audience.
Since the rise of user-centered design in the early 1980s, designers have struggled with how, exactly, to have “an early focus upon the characteristics and needs of the intended user population” according to J.D. Gould in “Human factors challenges…” (Friess, 2012, p. 1209). Through the use of personas, designers in recent years have kept the characteristics and needs of potential users at the early stage of the design process.
In the research paper, “Personas and Decision Making in the Design Process,” Erin Freiss conducted an observational study of a group of professional designers to investigate how they use personas in their actual design practice (2012).
The author went to a top-notch design firm based in the United States and worked with these design team members for a week. Two designers from the core team were the dedicated members who conducted the fieldwork and created the personas according to the user interviews. The rest of the group of designers was highly dedicated to the notion of personas. The author observed and audio-recorded all of their interactions. The recordings were then transcribed for analyzing and identifying the use of personas in the group’s interactions. There were 17 hours of recordings. There were 4,985 conversational turns.
Freiss collected data on “How often were personas used,” “Who invoked personas,” “Which personas were invoked,” “When were personas invoked,” and “How were personas used in decision-making” (2012). Data showed that although personas were meant to provide a “common language” for designers and clients, during the test, not a single client ever referred to a persona. The majority of the personas used by the group were invoked by the two designers who actually created the persona. Personas were mostly used by this group when the meeting had been specifically designated to deal with personas. Although designers were able to access the personas and usability data, the designers routinely bypassed the data they had collected. Instead, they used their own opinions or stories for persuasion.
I think the problem of the personas in the study is a lack of trust. Almost everyone, including the designers and clients, had no correspondence nor coherence in the decision-making process, because they did not create those personas. The personas are not a part of their experience or belief. However, the two designers who created the personas kept using them, because that was correspondence to them. This is because they believed that the personas were a good representation of the users. They went to the field study to conduct interviews and developed those personas according to their understanding of the users.
One of the solutions is to have a real user as a representative persona. People are more likely to make decisions or agree upon things that are real or that they have seen and experienced. Another solution is to repeat the personas so they become the facts, the truth of the product’s audience representation. However, that trust might take a while to build.
REFERENCES
Friess, Erin. (2012). Personas and decision making in the design process: an ethnographic case study. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ‘12). (1209–1218). Association for Computing Machinery.
Gould, J.D. & Boies, S.J. (1983). Human factors challenges in creating a principal support office system: The speech filing system approach. ACM Transactions on Office Information Systems, 1, 273–298.
