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The “what is beautiful is good” (WIBIG) effect implies that observers tend to perceive physically attractive people in a positive light. The authors investigate how the WIBIG effect applies to user personas, measuring designers' perceptions and task performance when employing user personas for the design of information technology (IT) solutions.

In a user experiment, the authors tested six different personas with 235 participants that were asked to develop remote work solutions based on their interaction with a fictitious user persona.

The findings showed that a user persona's perceived attractiveness was positively correlated with other perceptions of the persona. The personas' completeness, credibility, empathy, likability and usefulness increased with attractiveness. More attractive personas were also perceived as more agreeable, emotionally stable, extraverted and open, and the participants spent more time engaging with personas they perceived attractive. A linguistic analysis indicated that the IT solutions created for more attractive user personas demonstrated a higher degree of affect, but for the most part, task outputs did not vary by the personas' perceived attractiveness.

The WIBIG effect applies when designing IT solutions with user personas, but its effect on task outputs appears limited. The perceived attractiveness of a user persona can impact how designers interact with and engage with the persona, which can influence the quality or the type of the IT solutions created based on the persona. Also, the findings point to the need to incorporate hedonic qualities into the persona creation process. For example, there may be contexts where it is helpful that the personas be attractive; there may be contexts where the attractiveness of the personas is unimportant or even a distraction.

The findings point to the need to incorporate hedonic qualities into the persona creation process. For example, there may be contexts where it is helpful that the personas be attractive; there may be contexts where the attractiveness of the personas is unimportant or even a distraction.

Because personas are created to closely resemble real people, the authors might expect the WIBIG effect to apply. The WIBIG effect might lead decision makers to favor more attractive personas when designing IT solutions. However, despite its potential relevance for decision making with personas, as far as the authors know, no prior study has investigated whether the WIBIG effect extends to the context of personas. Overall, it is important to understand how human factors apply to IT system design with personas, so that the personas can be created to minimize potentially detrimental effects as much as possible.

German (corporate-) real estate management departments have been facing the challenge of poor data quality for years. This holds them back from generating efficiency potentials via the use of new methods from the field of digitalisation and from coping with the increasing requirements from the ESG context. The purpose of this paper is to explore why German (corporate-) real estate managements (do not) share data with their real estate service providers to address the data quality challenge and identify possible solutions.

To answer the research question, the reasoned action approach, an established theory from psychology for predicting human behaviour, is used. The relationships between the constructs are determined using linear regression. The study participants are almost exclusively from Germany.

The organisational milieu (perceived behavioural control) has a significant impact on the behaviour of sharing data with real estate service providers. Especially the change of contractual arrangements (data-driven contracts) seems to be crucial for the improvement of information logistics.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, for the first time, the reasoned action approach is used within the German real estate industry to predict organisational behaviour in the context of digitalisation.