Does an Individual’s Myers-Briggs Type Indicator Preference Influence Task-Oriented Techno.pdf

Does an Individual’s Myers-Briggs Type Indicator Preference Influence Task-Oriented Technology Use? Pamela Ludford and Loren Terveen University of Minnesota, Department of Computer Science and Engineering 4-192 EE/CS Building, 200 Union Street SE, Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA {ludford | terveen}@ Abstract: Technology innovators face the challenge of finding representative groups of users to participate in design activities. In some cases, software applications will target an audience of millions, and the characteristics of the vast number of potential users are unclear to the design team. In other cases, a technology is so new that the target market of potential users is not known. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) measures individual personality preferences on four dimensions and is used by psychologists to explain certain differences in human behavior. The definitions of the MBTI dimensions suggest they could be a factor explaining why individuals take different approaches to using software applications. This study explores whether MBTI preferences affect behavior when individuals perform tasks using three different software applications. We find a person’s MBTI type influences how they organize email and the informational features they rely on when using a decision support system. Keywords: Participatory design, Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, MBTI, persona, personality, collaborative filtering, recommender system. 1 Introduction An outstanding challenge in Human Computer Interaction (HCI) practice is to understand differences in how individuals use technology. This is necessary since successful technology development requires input from a representative set of potential users. The set of potential users should span the range of differences among individuals that may influence technology. For various applications, these factors may include age, gender, job function, language, culture, etc. In this work, we explore the use of an