Using video to represent users
A recent HCI / UCD project of mine has been to examine different ways of describing the user of a software product – so called “personas”. My focus was to examine whether representing the user with video instead of text would allow the developers to engage more in the lifes of the user. The amount of engagement is measured in the persona’s ability to function as an agent in a scenario: is it easy to imagine the persona working with your product?
The whole reason to use personas, is to make developers engage into them in order for them to create scenarios. The scenarios situate the fictitious users (personas) in context with the developed system, and can in turn help spot usability complications from several angles (with multiple personas as actors and with multiple scenarios with the same persona). Scenarios do not have to be part of the documentation-fest, but can be created instantly in the minds of the developers each time they want to make a design solution from a perspective other than their own. The only documentation necesarry is the persona itself – but once you get a taste of who the persona represents, there is no need for going back to read the documenation describing it.
Anyway… back to the original topic – which is better for allowing engagement: a textual persona or a video persona?
What I found was that there are severe differences in how a reader looks at text and how how a reader looks at video. When you read a text of a fictitious person, you instantly know that the person you read about is fiction. Text can’t describe everything, but tries to in an abstract way. When you read that a person is a “striking liberal” you might conclude that the same person likes a sense of autonomy in his job, or that he likes to take responsibility of his actions. We read more than there is to read – we impose certain characteristics to the person as we create an instance of him in our minds. We use references to people we know as we try to fill out the missing narrative gaps.
When you watch a real person on video do different tasks and hear the person speak in an interview, you believe that person is a real person. There are fewer missing gaps as we can watch facial expressions, hear the pitch of voice, and listen to what the person is telling us. We look at the person represented on video as he is really existing – as he is a real person. The person on video is seen not as fiction, but as fact! – Even though the person on the video is completely fictitious!
This means that we restrain ourselves from putting words in the video-persona’s mouth. As the person is real and not fiction, we have a hard time making up and imagining new details about him. This is important if you are going to imagine the persona in different contexts. When it comes to using the person as an agent in scenarios, we go blank and can only keep to the details and dilemmas presented in the video. We hesitate from mixing fiction into facts.
This has turned out to be a very interesting study. Is it really true that we can not see video-representations of persons as a fictitious person we can further evolve in our minds? And what does this say about the power of mass-media television?