Framing Personas: Enhancing Engagement and Perspective Taking

Abstract

Personas are a tool in user-centered software design to make users’ goals and needs tangible for the designers of the product. Engaging with personas is seen as a means for empathizing with users and avoiding product development from the developers' own perspective ("I-methodology"). In an empirical study with 59 participants, we investigated whether the instructions that framed the use of a persona had an impact on the engagement with the persona and the use of I-methodology. Using eye tracking, we showed that instructions mentioning a prospective brainstorming task lead to significantly longer visit durations of the persona description. Furthermore, the tendency to use I-methodology was significantly lower. The results of this study offer strategies using personas to enhance designers’ abilities to adopt a different perspective for their further software development tasks.