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Does a Persona Improve Creativity? Chaehan So
International Design School for Advanced Studies, Hongik University, Seoul, South Korea
ABSTRACT The purpose of this study was to test whether the priming of a brainstorming task by a persona increases ideational fluency and originality, i.e. the quantitative and qualitative dimensions of creative performance. We conducted a preliminary (n = 18) and final (n = 32) experiment with international students of business. These experiments revealed that priming of brainstorming by a persona increases originality of ideas by a large effect size (Cohen’s d = .91, p = .02), and not significantly ideational fluency by a medium effect size (Cohen’s d = .33, p = .39). As an alternative explanation to empathy, the found creativity effect may be attributed to priming that retrieves related memory items and thereby facilitates idea generation. As practical implications, design thinking practitioners can expect more original ideas and overcome design fixation if they brainstorm on a persona which is modelled in a concise and consistent way that caters to understanding the user need.
The Design Journal
College of Business Administration, Kookmin University, Seoul, South Korea
DOI: 10.1080/14606925.2017.1319672
Jaewoo Joo
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Chaehan So and Jaewoo Joo
KEYWORDS: empathy, persona, creativity, originality, ideational fluency, brainstorming, brainwriting, design methodology, design thinking, design research
Introduction Is there scientific proof for a positive effect of empathy on creativity? The current practice of design thinking justifies its human-centred design paradigm on such an effect, manifested in the term empathic design (Koskinen and Battarbee 2003; Postma, Lauche, and Stappers 2012; Postma et al. 2012). Consulting companies and design thinking institutes have actively promoted this claim, e.g. in IDEO’s human-centred design toolkit (IDEO 2009). However, neither of the two directly concerned research fields, design and psychology, provide any scientific investigation into the underlying question. So far, design researchers merely rely on a creativity effect of empathic design strategies (McDonagh and Thomas 2010, 458). These strategies consist of several ethnographic observation tools, like in-depth interviews or visual registers, as well as modelling tools like mind maps, affinity maps, journey maps, personas and empathy maps (Tschimmel 2012, 12–13).
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Personas and Empathy Current design thinking methodology is centred on the belief that inducing empathy in practitioners would improve creativity, and that the empathy level can be increased by using a persona during ideation (Miaskiewicz and Kozar 2011). The persona is a ‘hypothetical archetype of real users’ (Pruitt and Adlin 2006) that can be imagined as a real person (name, age, personal habits, hobbies, emotions), and serves to express a specific user need. When designers or design thinkers form such a persona, they use it in subsequent ideation, prototyping and testing phases as a point of reference (Kouprie and Visser 2009). They prefer the persona over the target group of traditional marketing as a purely demographical description of target users. The expected benefit of modelling a persona lies in the paradigm of human-centred design (Hanington 2003). This paradigm aims at capturing a more holistic view of the human aspects of the user (Giacomin 2014). In this view, a persona is expected to facilitate imagining the user as a real human, thus to evoke empathy with this human (Pruitt and Adlin 2006). This empathy, in turn, ultimately should generate more creative and more human-centred solutions.
Personas and Priming The psychological mechanism that could explain an improved performance in brainstorming on a persona is priming. Priming is the mental process of processing information of a particular semantic category
Does a Persona Improve Creativity?
that facilitates subsequent processing of related information and focuses attention on category-related aspects (Tulving and Schacter 1990). Semantic priming facilitates the processing of words related to the target word, and words likely to occur after the priming event (Neely 1977, 251). Visual and semantic priming increases processing fluency for judgments of aesthetic pleasure and thus determines the perception of beauty (Reber, Schwarz, and Winkielman 2004). Priming by an online game increased both quantity and quality of ideas even though participants were unaware of the priming purpose (Dennis, Minas, and Bhagwatwar 2013). When priming for a broad vs a narrow focus by cognitive and physiological cues, priming improved creativity (Friedman et al. 2003). Applied to the current research, participants who were given the persona problem statement would imagine similar experiences more easily through remembering their own or others’ experiences due to the persona priming. This facilitated imagination could create an additional memory space that in turn could make participants generate more ideas and more effective ideas than for a neutral problem statement.
Ideational Fluency As main quantitative dimension, ideational fluency serves to measure the amount of ideas generated in a certain time period (Runco et al.
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Creativity is a multifaceted phenomenon that has been researched in the context of problem-solving, innovation and design thinking along its qualitative and quantitative dimensions (Amabile and Pillemer 2012; Batey 2012; Runco and Jaeger 2012). As qualitative dimension, originality is used to detect an idea’s degree of novelty (Runco and Jaeger 2012). This degree is evaluated in most cases by a judge and therefore prone to the subjectivity of his assessment. To reduce this bias, originality is often evaluated by multiple raters whose mean score is taken as the originality score (Batey 2012). The selection of judges ranges from novice judges to expert judges with a preference to the latter (Baer and McKool 2009; Vincent, Decker, and Mumford 2002). For example, several industrial designers with ample work experience were invited to evaluate subjects’ submissions (Burroughs and Mick 2004; Dahl and Moreau 2002). One method is to summarize the judges’ ratings; creativity researchers often apply the Consensual Assessment Technique (CAT) by Amabile (1996). The CAT is based on a measure of consensus between different judges that is defined as the degree of inter-rater agreement (Baer and McKool 2009). This technique yields low reliability of results when the inter-rater agreement is low. Therefore, averaging over different raters should only be applied if the inter-rater agreement is sufficiently high.
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Originality
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2011). It was detected as a confounding factor of originality (Hocevar 1979) and is therefore measured as a separate dimension of creativity. The preferred format of brainstorming in design thinking methodology is brainwriting (VanGundy 1984) with Post-it notes. Each idea is written down on a separate Post-it, which facilitates the subsequent sharing of ideas and counting process. Maximizing the amount of ideas generated, in other words ideational fluency, has long been advocated as the goal for brainstorming activity by its author, Osborn (1957). In one of his core rules for brainstorming, he clearly formulates the goal of maximizing the number of generated ideas (‘quantity is wanted’), as opposed to the quality of ideas, in a brainstorming session. The relationship Osborn implied seems plausible: the more ideas generated, the more selectivity can be applied to choosing the best, i.e. most original, ideas. Both the quantitative and qualitative dimensions of creativity are correlated by r = .35, a medium-sized effect size (Baruah and Paulus 2008). This relationship nourishes some design thinking practitioners’ hope that if you only ask people to aim for maximum number of ideas in brainstorming, you will eventually get the most novel ideas as outcomes. According to Moreau and Engeset (2016), the determinants of these two outcomes differed in that fluency reflects the effort which participants devote to generating ideas while originality is indicative of participants’ divergent thinking.
Research Question and Hypotheses Although current design thinking methodology sees the value of human-centred design largely in the effect of empathy, design research in the past decades is surprisingly void of any scientific endeavour to verify the underpinnings of this proclaimed effect. The current research aims to fill this gap by providing a first systematic and methodological step into scrutinizing the empathy–creativity relationship. Specifically, the focus will be on the design thinking tool most widely associated with triggering empathy, the persona (Cooper 1999). This association, however, is just another assumption of design thinking practitioners. It has previously been uncontested and as such, provides the research question of this paper:
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Does the use of personas de facto induce empathy? Empathizing with others by imagining a persona could make people search for other ideas than for a neutral problem statement. For example, encouraging people to imagine a stressed-out employee could release their memories of friends or of themselves in the same situation. Remembering others’ or own similar experiences could improve cognitive aspects such as retrieval fluency or processing fluency similar to priming. This cognitive improvement could constitute a positive effect of empathy on creativity.
Does a Persona Improve Creativity?
On these grounds, and in line with the research question, we derive the following two hypotheses: H1 People generate more ideas in a brainstorming task when they are primed by a persona than when not primed. H2 People generate more original ideas in a brainstorming task when they are primed by a persona than when not primed.
Method The current research conducted a preliminary and a final experiment to test the hypotheses that priming of a brainstorming task with a persona would improve quantitative (H1) and qualitative (H2) creative performance. In this experiment, we tested whether priming by a persona positively impacts the creative performance for solving a user-related problem. To enable this comparison, we used a problem content bearing a high likelihood of imagining others’ or own experiences. The experiment compares the creative performance between an experimental condition with persona priming to a control condition with a neutral statement without priming.
Participants In a preliminary experiment, 18 students (10 male, 8 female) averaging 23.89 years (SD = 2.03) participated. All of them were enrolled in a new product development class at Kookmin University. In the final experiment, the sample was recruited from 32 students (18 male, 14 female) of a marketing communication class at Kookmin University. They were given the incentive of a one-hour course credit for their participation. After collecting 32 responses, we dropped three responses because two participants answered no questions at all whereas one participant was an outlier. In total, we analysed the responses from 29 students (17 male, 12 female) averaging 23.17 years (SD = 1.56).
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The preliminary and final experiment employed a two between-subjects design with an experimental condition (persona priming) and a control condition (no priming). We randomly assigned participants to one of the two conditions and gave them a brief introduction to the experiment. In the persona condition, participants read as instruction: ‘How can you help Bernd to experience less stress at his work place? Bernd is 40-years-old
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Design
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Manager at Siemens Married, two kids Works 45–50 h/week Has a team of eight people Stressed by frequent deadlines No time for sports & music’
In the control condition, participants received a brainstorming prompt: ‘How can you help an employee to experience less stress at his/her work place?’ Each of the above instructions ended with the task description: ‘Please write as many ideas as possible how to solve this problem. Write one idea per box.’
Differences between Preliminary and Final Experiment We made the following modifications in the final experiment’s research design. First, we introduced a time constraint to test whether participants showed a difference in ideational fluency. Second, we let participants write down their ideas with pen on paper instead of filling in an online survey to remove manual typing and visual problems due to small devices (smartphone, tablet). Third, we introduced manipulation checks to verify whether we successfully manipulated empathy state.
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Measures As manipulation check of the experimental condition, we tested participants by the following two measures of state empathy. Perspective Taking. The cognitive part of empathy, perspective taking, was measured as the degree to which participants imagined the target person. Participants answered the corresponding item ‘When you wrote ideas, how much did you successfully experience/imagine yourself as a stressed person in the previous page?’ on a 7-point Likert scale (1 = not at all to 7 = very much). This item was adapted from prior research on perspective taking (Davis et al. 1996; Galinsky and Moskowitz 2001). Inclusion of Other in the Self (IOS). Interpersonal closeness is the degree how close participants feel to the target person. It is measured by the IOS scale by Aron, Aron, and Smollan (1992). The corresponding item displays two circles symbolizing the self and the other in seven gradually increasing degrees of overlapping (see Figure 1). Ideational fluency. We measured fluency by counting the number of ideas generated by each person (Batey 2012). The preliminary experiment did this without time limitation, whereas the final experiment applied a time constraint of three minutes. Originality. We measured originality by comparing each idea to the frequency of its occurrence across participants, and rated it according
Does a Persona Improve Creativity?
Figure 1. Inclusion of Other in the Self (IOS) scale (Aron et al., 1992)
to the scoring procedure of the Guilford’s Unusual Uses Test (Guilford 1967). According to this procedure, an idea that was mentioned by only 5% of the participants was deemed ‘unusual’ and received a single point, and an idea mentioned by only 1% of the participants was considered ‘unique’ and received two points. Ideas generated by more than 5% of participants received zero points. After following this scoring procedure, we created each participant’s originality score by adding the points earned from each of the ideas generated. Two judges independently computed these originality scores, and their correlation was high (r = .91). For the few cases in which the scores diverged, a third judge recomputed the scoring, and the score agreed on by two of the three judges was used in the analysis. We removed one outlier from the sample showing a participant that earned 8 points in creativity for 11 ideas, a count that distinctly deviated from the mean (Moriginality = 1.41, SDoriginality = 1.64) by four standard deviations. Time and Ln time. We measured the duration how many milliseconds each participant invested in generating ideas (Mtime = 2054.11, SDtime = 2095.69, range: 485 – 7120). A logarithmic transformation is often used to analyse and compare data that are greater than zero and grow exponentially. We log transformed and compared the time data between the two conditions (Mlntime = 7.26, SDlntime = 0.83, range: 6.18 – 8.87).
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As control variables, we selected two measures of trait empathy, as well as age, gender, and personality. Personality. The Big Five Inventory (BFI) is a self-report measure designed to assess the high-order personality traits of Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism. We used a short scale of the BFI called BFI-10 (Rammstedt and John 2007) containing 10 items (1 = strongly disagree to 5 = strongly agree). An 11th item was added, as recommended in the study, to increase reliability of the agreeableness factor.
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Control variables
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Trait Empathy. For trait empathy, we used the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI) by Davis (1983) containing 14 items that measure empathy in the two dimensions Perspective Taking and Empathic Concern (1 = does not describe me very well to 5 = describes me very well). Additionally, we tested with the Basic Empathy Scale (BES) by Carré et al. (2013) with 20 items to indicate trait empathy (1 = strongly disagree to 5 = strongly agree).
Procedure Preliminary Experiment Participants entered their ideas into an online survey tool. As a technological platform, we used an online survey service called Surveygizmo to collect data. We selected this service over other services (e.g. Qualtrics) because one of its features provided experimenters with the time duration data for each participant to complete each page of question. We were interested in how much time each participant invested in the idea generation task when there was no time limit as a measure of effort and motivation.
Final Experiment Participants wrote their ideas on a sheet of paper. In both conditions, they were instructed to read the problem statement and then generate ideas to solve this problem. We allowed them to generate ideas freely, without any problem-solving constraints. We specified that they should write down one idea per line so that each idea could be correctly counted. The allotted time for the brainstorming task was three minutes. In order to make sure that the time limit was kept, the whole participants were asked not to turn to the next page until instructed to do so. Then, the participants completed the brainstorming task. After three minutes had passed, participants had to turn to the next page on which they answered two questions about how stressed they felt for manipulation check of the persona factor (Perspective Taking, IOS Scale) and the three sets of questions for control variables (i.e. BFI-10, IRI Scale, BSE).
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Results Preliminary Experiment Ideational fluency. Fluency scores did not differ significantly between the two conditions in a one-way ANOVA (Mpersona = 6.00, SDpersona = 5.70 vs Mcontrol = 6.89, SDcontrol = 5.04; F(1.16) = 0.12, Cohen’s d = .17, p = .73). Originality. Participants in the persona condition generated better ideas than participants in the control condition (Mpersona = 3.44, SDpersona = 2.79 vs Mcontrol = 2.56, SDcontrol = 4.04; F(1.16) = 0.30, Cohen’s d = .25, p = .60).
Does a Persona Improve Creativity?
Time and Ln time. Participants in the persona condition spent more time on generating ideas than participants in the control condition, but not significantly (Mpersona = 2399.56, SDpersona = 2435.15 vs Mcontrol = 1708.67, SDcontrol = 1770.42; F(1.16) = 0.47, p = .50). Their log-transformed time data confirmed this finding (Mpersona = 7.41, SDpersona = 0.86 vs Mcontrol = 7.10, SDcontrol = 0.82; F(1.16) = 0.63, p = .44). Control variables. We found no evidence that control variables predict ideational fluency. When we added the four control variables (age, gender, BES, and BFI-10) to the condition as independent variables into a multiple regression to predict ideational fluency, no control variable showed a significant effect. Age (ß = −0.35, t = 0.25, p = .81), gender (ß = −3.24, t = 0.73, p = .49), and BES (ß = 0.69, t = 0.09, p = .93) did not predict it. Further, Big Five personality scores including Openness (ß = 1.71, t = 0.49, p = .64), Conscientiousness (ß = −0.19, t = 0.09, p = .93), Extraversion (ß = −1.21, t = 0.52, p = .61), Agreeableness (ß = 1.76, t = 0.47, p = .65), and Neuroticism (ß = 2.59, t = 0.92, p = .38) did not predict it either. We also found no evidence that control variables predict originality. When we added the four control variables to the condition as independent variables into a multiple regression to predict originality, no control variable showed a significant effect. Age (ß = 0.23, t = 0.24, p = .82), gender (ß = −1.97, t = 0.67, p = .52), and BES (ß = 1.61, t = 0.32, p = .76) did not predict it. Further, Big Five personality scores including Openness (ß = −0.45, t = 0.20, p = .85), Conscientiousness (ß = −0.43, t = 0.32, p = .76), Extraversion (ß = −1.67, t = 1.10, p = .31), Agreeableness (ß = 1.28, t = 0.52, p = .62), and Neuroticism (ß = 0.22, t = 0.12, p = .91) did not predict it either.
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The findings of the preliminary experiment show a differentiated and non-intuitive pattern that demanded caution for any premature conclusions. Nevertheless, these findings served useful to improve the methodological approach for the final experiment. Therefore, we critically discuss the inconsistent results in order to justify the modifications in the final experiment. First of all, it appears non-intuitive that the fluency scores were lower in the experimental condition than in the control condition (Mpersona = 6.00 vs Mcontrol = 6.89). It is difficult to explain this result from any creativity theory. A possible practical reason is that participants may not have been fluent in English, and hence the more detailed instructions in the experimental condition acted as a cognitive burden. It would be premature, however, to draw any conclusions at this point as all the fluency-related differences were not significant. Second, the persona condition yielded higher originality than the control condition (Mpersona = 3.44 vs Mcontrol = 2.56) but not on a significant level (p = .60).
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Experiment Redesign
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Third, the time duration for finishing the creativity task was inconsistent. Participants who had read the persona description spent more time on generating ideas (2399.56 s) than the control condition (1708.67 s). Nevertheless, this higher time duration (11.5 minutes more) did not correspond to higher, but lower, fluency scores. The findings of the preliminary experiment brought up a puzzling picture which can be condensed into the following questions: Why did the control condition partly perform higher than the experimental condition, and why were the mean differences not significant in most cases? Apart from the obvious methodological critique point, low sample size, we saw another root cause with a potentially higher impact. The creativity performance scores are heavily confounded by time spent. As mentioned above, the time duration scores were generally extremely high, also in the control condition. This may explain why the fluency scores were, contrary to our predictions, higher in the control condition than in the experimental condition. To remove this apparent confoundation of the entire results, we introduced a time constraint in the final experiment.
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Final Experiment To report the differences between the experimental and control condition, we calculated the corresponding effect sizes according to Cohen (1992). Manipulation check. Responses to the two manipulation check questions were entered into a one-way ANOVA. Participants in the persona condition experienced themselves as stressed persons more highly than participants in the control condition (Mpersona = 5.27, SDpersona = 1.42 vs Mcontrol = 4.06, SDcontrol = 1.47; F(1.27) = 4.78, p = .04, Cohen’s d = .84). Further, participants in the persona condition included stressed persons in the self, more than participants in the control condition (Mpersona = 4.91, SDpersona = 1.22 vs Mcontrol = 3.94, SDcontrol = 1.39; F(1.27) = 3.59, p = .07, Cohen’s d = .74). These findings confirmed that our manipulation by a persona instruction worked as intended. Ideational fluency. Fluency scores (Mfluency = 5.45, SDfluency = 2.21, range: 2–9) in a one-way ANOVA showed a positive difference between the two conditions (Mpersona = 5.91, SDpersona = 2.26 vs Mcontrol = 5.17, SDcontrol = 2.20; F(1.27) = .76, Cohen’s d = .33). This difference, however, was not significant (p = .39). Originality. We measured originality by comparing each idea to the frequency of its occurrence across participants according to the scoring procedure outlined by Guilford (1967). Originality scores were entered into a one-way ANOVA. We found that participants in the persona condition generated more original ideas than participants in the control condition (Mpersona = 2.27, SDpersona = 1.49 vs Mcontrol = .89, SDcontrol = 1.53; F(1.27) = 5.70, p = .02, Cohen’s d = .91).
Does a Persona Improve Creativity?
Control variables. As control variables, we selected age, gender, personality measured by BFI-10, and two trait empathy measured by IRI and BES. We found no evidence that the control variables predict ideational fluency. When we entered not only the condition but also control variables as independent variables to predict ideational fluency, no control variable showed a significant effect. Age (ß = 0.20, t = 0.41, p = .69), gender (ß = −1.66, t = 1.42, p = .18), BES (ß = −1.73, t = 0.55, p = .59), Empathic Concern (ß = 0.35, t = 0.22, p = .83), and Perspective Taking (ß = 0.97, t = 0.74, p = .47) did not predict it. Further, Big Five personality scores including Openness (ß = 0.13, t = 0.19, p = .85), Conscientiousness (ß = 0.41, t = 0.44, p = .67), Extraversion (ß = −0.22, t = 0.26, p = .80), Agreeableness (ß = −0.43, t = 0.46, p = .66), and Neuroticism (ß = 0.12, t = 0.18, p = .86) did not predict it either. We also found no evidence that control variables predict originality. When we entered not only condition but also control variables as independent variables to predict originality, no control variable showed a significant effect. Age (ß = 0.16, t = 0.48, p = .64), gender (ß = −0.42, t = 0.54, p = .60), BES (ß = −2.69, t = 1.28, p = .0.22), Empathic Concern (ß = 0.60, t = 0.58, p = .57), and Perspective Taking (ß = 0.17, t = 0.19, p = .85) did not predict it. Further, Big Five personality scores including Openness (ß = −0.54, t = 1.17, p = .26), Conscientiousness (ß = 0.11, t = 0.17, p = .87), Extraversion (ß = −0.85, t = 1.53, p = .15), Agreeableness (ß = −0.29, t = 0.47, p = .65), and Neuroticism (ß = 0.17, t = 0.38, p = .71) did not predict it either.
Hypothesis Testing
The results of the final experiment clearly solved the inconsistencies of the preliminary experiment. First, the fluency scores of the persona condition now were higher, not lower, than in the control condition. Second, comparing originality between the persona and control condition showed a significant difference (p = .02), unlike in the preliminary experiment (p = .60). The effect size (Cohen’s d) increased from .25 to
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Discussion
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Following the guidelines by Cohen (1977), we categorize an effect size of approximately 0.2 as small, 0.5 as medium, and 0.8 as large. Testing the first hypothesis (H1: People generate more ideas in a brainstorming task when they are primed by a persona than not primed) yielded a positive difference by a small to medium effect size (Cohen’s d = .33) however on a high significance level (p = .39). This result does not allow us to confirm hypothesis H1. The test of the second hypothesis (H2: People generate more original ideas in a brainstorming task when they are primed by a persona than when not primed) brought up a significant result (p = .02) of a positive and large effective size (Cohen’s d = .91). This finding allows us to confirm hypothesis H2.
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0.91, i.e. from a small to a large effect size according to Cohen’s (1977) guidelines. We attribute these improved results to fixing the preliminary experiment’s major problem, the unlimited time. Under the same time constraint, participants produced more ideas, not less, and their originality difference became significant on p = .02. After all, time constraints do foster creativity (Burroughs and Mick 2004).
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Theoretical Implications There are several theoretical explanations for this result. In this paper, we presented an alternative explanation to empathy. Priming with a persona which shows a widespread daily problem like stress can create an association with a similar self-experienced situation in people’s minds. This association facilitates the retrieval of other information related to this situation which in turn increases the solution space for the creativity task. This explanation is plausible because priming is associated with short-term memory (McKone 1995) and known to increase processing fluency (Whittlesea and Leboe 2003). The fluency mechanism of priming may also explain the high significance level of the first hypothesis test. The higher variance of ideational fluency may reflect the higher variance of processing fluency. The latter, in turn, may correspond to higher varying degrees of priming effectiveness. This may lie in the fact that the priming cue, the specific persona used, appears more or less familiar to participants’ memory space. An additional effect is that the memory of this situation will revive the experienced emotion, which in turn favours the emergence of empathy (Decety 2004). It must be pointed out, however, that empathy induction and persona priming are not synonymous. The respected reader is well advised to apply caution on any consultant’s claim that design thinking would ‘apply’ empathy. No clear evidence has been shown for such a systematic use and existence of empathy in design thinking, except qualitative reviews. It therefore remains wishful thinking from an academic point of view. This caution on any generalization about empathy seems appropriate despite the successful manipulation checks on state empathy, and in consideration of the low sample size. The psychological research on empathy spans decades of search on its phenomenology (e.g. Cialdini et al. 1987; Davis 1983; Håkansson and Montgomery 2003; Preston and Hofelich 2012). What makes it complex is the fact that design thinking practitioners most often confuse empathy with many commonly known emotional phenomena like sympathy or perspective taking (Preston and Hofelich 2012), which renders their observations and conclusions invalid.
Practical Implications In light of the above-mentioned caution on concluding an empathy effect, the current research found a clear priming effect that design thinkers can harness. Priming can colloquially be described as a
Does a Persona Improve Creativity?
‘preloading process’ of the brain that makes cognitive processing easier towards a certain semantic category. This mental preloading facilitates retrieval and processing fluency for cognitive activities related to the preloaded category. To assure this priming effect, design thinkers should model a persona that is: (1) easy to imagine as a person, i.e. not overloaded with information irrelevant to the user need; and (2) is intuitive for deriving the user need from, i.e. all descriptive information caters for capturing this user need. Following this guideline will help to improve their creative performance in producing original solutions to a given design challenge. If design thinkers are used to ideate on solving design challenges without a persona, they could still benefit from switching to a persona-primed ideation in particular situations. For example, it is common for designers to ‘get stuck’ after extended periods of research in so-called design fixation (Jansson and Smith 1991). Apart from that, repeated sessions of brainstorming are known for diminishing returns. As the total amount of ideas grow, it becomes increasingly more difficult to generate ideas that are new in essence. Here, exchanging the persona in the brainstorming prompt is an easy way to reach for novel ideas.
Limitations Low sample size. The experiment was performed with relatively low sample sizes. The low sample size in the preliminary experiment (n = 18) may account for the largely insignificant results. The higher sample size in the final experiment (n = 32) may partly be responsible for the significant result of testing H2. Selection bias. Selection bias accounts for interpretation mistakes due to ‘systematic differences in the characteristics between those who are selected for study and those who are not’ (Last 2001). Such distortion may come from an over-reliance on the sample and sample-specific data collection. For example, we only tested students of the same class. They showed varying discipline when completing the online survey.
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The current research found that persona priming improves significantly (p = .02) the originality of ideas, and by a large effect size (Cohen’s d = .91). This means that the use of a persona does have a positive effect on brainstorming, providing the first research evidence for this long-pending claim. Our experiment also detected a priming effect on ideational fluency (Cohen’s d = .33) which we cannot generalize due to the high significance level (p = .39). Our work shows that using a persona, one of the most common tools in design thinking, improves the performance of creative idea generation in a qualitative way. This impact makes the persona an effective catalyst for producing real innovation. It should be noted, however, that we attribute this effect to priming rather than empathy. If using a persona de facto increases state empathy remains a question to be answered by future research. In this
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Conclusion
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investigation, it will be interesting to differentiate between the cognitive and affective dimension of any assumed empathy effect.
Acknowledgements This work was supported by the Hongik University new faculty research fund. We express our gratitude to Theo So for thoroughly reviewing our final manuscript.
Disclosure Statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
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Biographies Chaehan So is a professor of Design & Marketing Research at the International Design School for Advanced Studies (IDAS), Hongik University, in Seoul. His research interests are on creativity, empathy, and design thinking methodology. Due to his PhD in Psychology (Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany), Chaehan is interested in new and psychologically-grounded ways of creating design experience, e.g. embodied design, and techniques from professional schools of acting, singing and dancing. Jaewoo Joo is an assistant professor of Marketing in the College of Business Administration and a participating professor of Experience Design in the Graduate School of Techno Design, both at Kookmin University in Seoul, Korea. He earned his PhD in Marketing from the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto. Jaewoo writes and teaches about Design Marketing and New Product Development through the lens of the Psychology of Judgment and Decision Making.
Address for Correspondence Chaehan So, Hongik University, Seoul, South Korea. Email:
[email protected]
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Chaehan So http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0546-2947 Jaewoo Joo http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3162-6191
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ORCID
