A comparative study of Gemini generated personas and real user personas for restaurant POS design

Abstract

The work experience under the internship is recorded in this report, which is based on the position of a UI/UX Designer in the design of a Restaurant Point of Sales(POS) Design at Bdcalling IT Ltd. In particular, it demonstrates a case study of incorporating Human Computer Interaction (HCI) which focuses more on real world human users prior to the creation of interactive systems, but with the recent increase in the accessibility of large language models (LLMs) like Google Gemini, designers of user personas are evolving their views of the task. The paper presents a personal post internship research that presents a comparative study systematically of personas developed using real restaurant employees versus personas developed using Gemini of similar positions in a restaurant point of sale (POS) design. Based on HCI and UX literature on personas and synthetic users, the study develops and evaluates the hypothesis that Gemini generated personas can be used to approximate real user personas regarding the high level attitude and task objectives but it is systematically under representative of local infrastructural, organizational and cultural constraints. A structured questionnaire was used to gather new field data with the restaurant managers, cashiers, waiters and kitchen staff, and similar Gemini personas were generated by using detailed prompts to describe the same scenario. The most significant constructs included learning comfort with new software (1-5) and the rating of the importance of POS features (1-3) that were aligned among the groups and compared with the Mann Whitney U test that was adequate in the case of small and independent samples with ordinal Likert type data. Findings indicate that Gemini personas are quite close to actual staff on such large constructs as comfort with technology and the value of fast order entry and split bill support, and are more conservative in terms of the strength of issues relating to stock visibility, offline resilience and staff level accountability as reported by workers. The paper concludes that Gemini generated personas can be useful to jumpstart early HCI work, particularly when resources are limited, but it must be applied as a baseline and confirmed against actual user data before it is applied to make critical design choices in human centered software engineering.