Observations on Design Thinking in Novice Designers While Empathizing With Persona

Personas are a rich source of user information that assists designers at various stages of the design process. HCI designers use personas to help them explicate the understanding of their target users. Design literature advocates that personas are not only a source of information about users but also a tool to empathize with them. This chapter reports observations from an experimental study done on novice designers on how empathizing with persona affected their design solutions. A total of 50 novice designers participated in this study. Participants were asked to solve a graphical design problem for the persona. The data collected was analyzed through expert rating on design solutions on the basis of directness of illustration of persona information and verbal protocols. On the basis of direct illustration of persona information on design solutions, it was observed that empathizing with persona helped designers to iterate more on design thinking.

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