Christopher N. Chapman

The Personas' New Clothes: Methodological and Practical Arguments against a Popular Method:

We examine the popular Personas method and consider claims that personas can reflect empirical data and serve as an information source for development teams. We argue that there are significant methodological and practical difficulties for personas. It is difficult to determine how many, if any, users are represented by a persona, and thus is difficult to know whether a persona is relevant for intended users. Personas cannot be adequately verified or falsified and therefore have no demonstrable validity. We believe personas are likely to lead to political conflicts and to undermine the ability for researchers to resolve questions with data. We suggest potential research to evaluate the Personas method more thoroughly. Until the methodological issues are resolved, it is best not to consider personas to be a means to communicate data.

Pain and the defense response: structural equation modeling reveals a coordinated psychophysiological response to increasing painful stimulation

&NA; The defense response theory implies that individuals should respond to increasing levels of painful stimulation with correlated increases in affectively mediated psychophysiological responses. This paper employs structural equation modeling to infer the latent processes responsible for correlated growth in the pain report, evoked potential amplitudes, pupil dilation, and skin conductance of 92 normal volunteers who experienced 144 trials of three levels of increasingly painful electrical stimulation. The analysis assumed a two‐level model of latent growth as a function of stimulus level. The first level of analysis formulated a nonlinear growth model for each response measure, and allowed intercorrelations among the parameters of these models across individuals. The second level of analysis posited latent process factors to account for these intercorrelations. The best‐fitting parsimonious model suggests that two latent processes account for the correlations. One of these latent factors, the activation threshold, determines the initial threshold response, while the other, the response gradient, indicates the magnitude of the coherent increase in response with stimulus level. Collectively, these two second‐order factors define the defense response, a broad construct comprising both subjective pain evaluation and physiological mechanisms.

Quantitative Evaluation of Personas as Information

The personas method is said to present information about people of interest for product design. We propose a formal model to understand persona information in terms of factual attributes. Using an analytic model, we show that the expected prevalence rate of persona descriptions decreases rapidly as attributes are added. We then evaluate this expectation empirically. Using six survey datasets ranging from N=268 to N=10307 respondents and two simulated datasets, we determine the prevalence rates of 10000 randomly generated persona-like descriptions per dataset. Consistent with prediction, we observe decreasing prevalence rates as attributes are added. Pearsons r for observed vs. predicted prevalence, transformed to multinormality, ranges r(9998)=0.394 to r(9998)=0.869 in the sampled datasets (all p < 0.001). Because descriptions with many attributes are likely to represent few people, we suggest that personas should be assessed empirically before they are assumed to describe real groups of people.

Regulatory focus as a determinant of brand value

Purpose – This research aims to investigate the relationship between consumer regulatory focus and brand value.Design/methodology/approach – Three studies were conducted using both student subject pools and a broader sample from the US population. The relative chronic promotion or prevention orientation of each participant was measured, as was response to brand and pricing stimuli.Findings – Promotion‐oriented individuals are more sensitive to differences in established brands than prevention‐oriented individuals (studies 1 and 2), and promotion‐oriented individuals have a greater preference for new brands than prevention‐oriented individuals (study 2). Also, an individuals degree of chronic promotion orientation is an important driver of this relationship (study 3).Research limitations/implications – Brand quality is considered as a general concept rather than a multidimensional construct. Although brand is a largely affective and emotional product attribute, brand trust is a dimension of quality that h...

Fundamental Ethics in Information Systems

Information systems often present virtual spaces that are sufficient to enable important human interaction. By enabling such interaction, systems designers are inherently creating certain ethical structures. When one creates an information system, one also creates the ethics for a new world of interaction and such ethics needs specific attention. I outline the basic elements of ethical structures: a framework for interpersonal interaction, personal identity, and structural conditions for customs and rules. I then examine philosophical methods for examining such structures and give a framework for thinking about them in IT systems. Finally, I propose a method to apply ethical design within traditional system development lifecycle models. Applying an ethical framework to IT systems provides more complete conceptual models of systems. Instead of arguing for specific prescriptive rules, I wish to help systems designers understand how they create ethical structures and can do so more with more deliberation.

Digital Pen: Four Rounds of Ethnographic and Field Research

We report on a year-long qualitative and ethnographic project to examine the value of digital pen technology for note taking. A digital pen captures a facsimile of information written on specially patterned paper and makes it available for later review, management, data recognition, and archiving on a PC. We report ethnographic research on note-taking practices among US college students (N=19) and office workers in the US (N=12) and Japan (N=4). We review note-taking patterns observed in controlled laboratory research in the US (N=17) and Japan (N=8) and actual product usage in US field trials (N=15). Finally, we describe note-taking needs reported in enterprise site visits in the US, Japan, Canada, and India (N=28). We review behavioral barriers to adoption of digital pens, including lack of workflow integration, poor environmental availability, and cost. To increase its value to consumers, digital pen technology should cover more kinds of actual writing behavior.

Quantitative Early-Phase User Research Methods: Hard Data for Initial Product Design

We describe questions that commonly arise in early-phase user research for new technology products concerning customer needs, priorities, and market definition. We suggest that methods adopted from marketing research, statistics, and game theory may be helpful for user researchers to answer those questions. We show how these methods have been applied to real problems and decisions for a new product line at Microsoft. These methods are especially appropriate for HCI professionals because they require solid experience with experimental research and statistical methodology and complement other user research tools. The methods may be most effective when combined with detailed research on user tasks, goals, and interaction models. When research is synthesized in this way, it can make a strong contribution to product definition and business strategy.

Emerging Opportunities for Teaching and Research in Virtual Worlds

Since its inception in 2003, the virtual world of Second Life (SL) has grown at an extraordinary pace. Hundreds of thousands (possibly millions) of subscribers interact within the self-contained environment, creating goods, shopping, and socializing using “avatars” as representations of their identities. Although businesses have been quick to adopt SL as an outreach mechanism, business schools have only begun to examine SL as a teaching and research environment.

A genetic algorithm system for product line exploration and optimization

We report development and industrial application of a genetic algorithm (GA) model to find near-optimal product portfolios for marketing management. This GA model uses consumer preference information that is typically available from marketing studies such as choice-based conjoint (CBC) analysis and other discrete choice model projects. Because a single result might capitalize on chance, the system does not simply find one optimal portfolio but instead allows individual-level and model-level bootstrapping of results. Examination of the resulting distribution of near-optimal portfolios is informative for strategic insight and generation of market hypotheses. We describe application of the GA model in a personal computer accessory product line for a major manufacturer using CBC data from N=716 respondents. The distribution of portfolio results suggested that the manufacturers actual product line was potentially much larger than optimal and was missing two products that might be highly desired by consumers. Finally, we review the underlying computer code and its options. The model provides multiple methods of determining individual preference for the GA model along with various adjustable parameters.

Consumer Usage of a Digital Memory Device Prototype

We report qualitative consumer field trials of a prototype digital memory device known as SenseCam. We presented SenseCam to 25 consumers in the US (N=9), Japan (N=8), and South Korea (N=8) to determine initial interest and expected use cases. This was followed by respondents using an actual prototype camera for approximately one week and reporting on their experience. Actual use cases differed substantially from those initially expected by respondents. The results suggest that successful usage may emphasize stationary capture relatively more than moving scenes, and may emphasize recording of full scenes rather than recording outwardly from the body of what one has seen. We discuss implications for concepts of digital memory and suggest that general consumer interest in such a device may be related to construction of interesting narratives rather than the capture and review of factual data. We suggest future directions for device design and related interaction research.