Characterizing the Default Persona During Design: Mental Representations of Technology Users are Gendered
Mattea Sim, Basia Radka, Tadayoshi Kohno, Franziska Roesner, Kurt Hugenberg · 2025
Technology design has historically prioritized the needs of more socially powerful groups in society (e.g., affluent white men, or the default persona).How technology designers come to prioritize certain groups while overlooking others is a question with real implications for design.We rely on psychological theories of prototypicality to characterize the "gendered persona, " or the gender identity that comes spontaneously to mind when considering users.We conduct three studies including both non-expert convenience samples and expert samples of participants with technology design experience, exploring the gendered persona across populations and a range of technologies.We find that people are more likely to spontaneously describe users as men (across several technologies), whereas women are largely overlooked.Men represent the "prototypical user," a cultural stereotype shared by both non-experts and experts from populations whose stereotypes could impact real design decisions.