Role Playing on the Web. Guidelines for designing and evaluating personas online.

This article starts from the premise that humans communicate through a series of roles that they assume appropriate to their rhetorical purposes. Even when speaking face to face, they present a version of themselves that they deem suitable for the time, place, and situation. When this rhetorical principle is applied to Web design, it provides powerful insights and strategies for designing and evaluating online communication. We begin this article by tracing how the tradition of rhetorical role playing has become incorporated into the electronic medium. We then present a series of guidelines in the form of prompts or questions as starting points for effective Web design.