An international survey of practitioner's views on personas: benefits, resource demands and pitfalls

Opinions differ on the relative costs and benefits of personas as used in Interaction design (IxD) and User Experience (UX). And yet there has been little research to systematically elicit attitudes towards them held by IxD and UX professionals. We report a ‘state-of-practice’ survey conducted with IxD/UX professionals called ‘What’s Hot in Interaction Design’ and focus here on 20 items from the survey that elicited usage of and opinions about personas. The survey items were derived from opinions and reports collated from the academic and professional literature. We use factor analysis to reduce the items to a fundamental set of areas or concerns (factors), and use significance testing to test for agreement on each item including an analysis of the strength of opinion using odds ratio. According to the findings, 64% of respondents use personas with usage during research, design & evaluation phases. The factor analysis shows that opinions fall into three br oad areas: benefits, resource demands, and pitfalls. Practitioners tend to agree that personas have a range of benefits, but that they make demands on specific kinds of resources and there are some specific pitfalls—all of which we report. We discuss implications for improving personas through enhanced methods and tools, and curricula.