Perceptions of Personas: The Role of Instructions

Using personas can help develop better, more user-focused products and services. However, to be effective, it is important to foster engagement with the persona and make sure the personas are credible and can be perceived like real potential users. In an empirical study with 59 participants, we investigated these two issues. We used a persona that we introduced either as a “persona” or as a “real person”. Furthermore, we tested whether the instructions that framed the use of a persona or a supposedly “real” user had an impact on perception of the persona. Our results show that this perception did not depend on whether participants believed the user was a real person or a persona. Moreover, in several cases the instructions that indicated a later “brainstorming” task led to longer immersion in the data of the persona and to perception of the persona as having more gender stereotypical characteristics.