Proof personas make a difference in design

Posted by: Carl Smith on Thursday May 28, 2009

At a recent talk at UF we mentioned that there had been no conclusive evidence that creating personas improves the effectiveness of design. Today, courtesy of Jared Spool, we found out that new research has shown that personas do, in fact, make a difference.

The use of personas as a method for communicating user requirements in collaborative design environments is well established. However, very little research has been conducted to quantify the benefits of using this technique. The aim of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of using personas. An experiment was conducted over a period of five weeks using students from NCAD. The results showed that, through using personas, designs with superior usability characteristics were produced.

Thanks to the team at Frontend for making this research available.

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