Month: March 2019

Categories
Persona Creation Persona Research Personas

Confusion and Information Triggered by Photos in Persona Profiles

Introduction

For one of our persona research projects we investigate whether additional photos beyond a single headshot makes a persona profile more informative without confusing the end user.

Methods

We conduct an eye-tracking experiment and qualitative interviews with digital content creators after varying the persona in photos via a single headshot, a headshot, and photo of the persona in different contexts, and a headshot with photos of different people with key persona attributes the gender and age.

Findings

Findings show that contextual photos provide significantly more persona information to end users; however, showing photos of multiple people engenders confusion and lowers informativeness. Also, as anticipated, viewing additional photos requires more co.gnitive focus, which is measured by eye-tracking metrics; these metrics are correlated with levels of informativeness and confusion.

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Categories
Persona Research Personas Use of Personas User Personas Value of personas

Book Review: Personas – User Focused Design by Lene Nielsen

This review has been co-authored by Willemien Froneman, Joni Salminen, and Jim Jansen.

In the second edition of Personas – User Focused Design, Dr. Lene Nielsen describes a detailed method for implementing personas in development and innovation projects. Dr. Nielsen has pioneered the use of personas in user experience and has more than 20 years’ experience in the field. In addition to writing numerous research articles on personas, she has led masterclasses and workshops and has worked in industry and with government agencies for deployment of personas. Her practical and theoretical experience has culminated in the formulation of “10 steps to personas” – the method outlined and explained in this book.

The book is aimed at managers and team members who are looking to start implementing the persona method in product and service development, and at students who wish to use the method in their projects and who need to be familiar with the practical implications of the persona method as well as its theoretical foundations.

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Categories
Data-Driven Personas Persona Creation Personas

Design Issues in Automatically Generated Persona Profiles: A Qualitative Analysis from 38 Think-Aloud Transcripts

In this research, we examine uses in automatically generating personas from online data using qualitative methods.

The increased access to data and computational techniques enable innovations in the space of automated customer analytics, for example, automatic persona generation.

Automatic persona generation is the process of creating data-driven representations from user or customer statistics. Even though automatic persona generation is technically possible and provides advantages compared to manual persona creation regarding the speed and freshness of the personas, it is not clear (a) what information to include in the persona profiles and (b) how to display that information.

To query these aspects relating to the information design of personas, we conducted a user study with 38 participants. In the findings, we report several challenges relating to the design of automatically generated persona profiles, including usability issues, perceptual issues, and issues relating to information content.

Our research has implications for the information design of data-driven personas.

Salminen, J., Sengun, S., Jung, S.G., and Jansen, B. J. (2019) Design Issues in Automatically Generated Persona Profiles: A Qualitative Analysis from 38 Think-Aloud Transcripts. The ACM SIGIR Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval (CHIIR2019). Glasgow, UK. 10-14 March.

Categories
Benefits of Personas Data-Driven Personas Marketing Personas Persona Analytics Persona Creation Personas Use of Personas

Common Questions About Personas (We’ve Got the Answers!)

Hi!

In this blog post, we’ve gathered some commonly asked questions about personas. Got more questions about personas? Just send us a message and we’ll address your question!

Frequently Asked Persona Questions:

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Categories
Marketing Personas Persona Analytics Personas

How can I use a persona for customer segmentation?

Personas are human like descriptions of customer segments. Just like customer segments, you can use the persona technique to divide your overall market into smaller subset that you can then examine individually.

In practice, the best way of using personas for customer segmentation is to apply a technique of data-driven persona creation, such as automatic persona generation. Using this approach, you can create an arbitrary number of personas from your source data; e.g., 5, 10, 50, or 100 personas.

If you are interested in learning more, just contact the persona team!

Jansen, B. J., Salminen, J., and Jung, S.G. (2020) Data-Driven Personas for Enhanced User Understanding: Combining Empathy with Rationality for Better Insights to Analytics. Data and Information Management. 4(1), 1-17.  https://content.sciendo.com/view/journals/dim/4/1/article-p1.xml

Categories
Data-Driven Personas Persona Analytics Personas

How are personas and market segments different?

Personas and market segments are highly similar in the sense that they both are based on real data about the customers. However, the main difference is that personas individualize that data in a representation that has a name, face, and human attributes. In conclusion:

Personas = human like representations of customer groups
Market segments = nameless, faceless descriptions of customer groups

Jansen, B. J., Salminen, J., and Jung, S.G. (2020) Data-Driven Personas for Enhanced User Understanding: Combining Empathy with Rationality for Better Insights to Analytics. Data and Information Management. 4(1), 1-17.  https://content.sciendo.com/view/journals/dim/4/1/article-p1.xml

Categories
Advertising Personas Marketing Personas Personas Use of Personas

How can I use a persona for advertising?

Advertising is often considered to have four main functions: (a) targeting, i.e., selecting whom the marketing messages are sent to, (b) message creation, i.e., copywriting, which referes to creating ads and other marketing communications that are customized for the selected target group(s), (c) channel selection, i.e., deciding which mediums to use in order to reach the target group(s), and (d) reporting, i.e., analyzing the results of an advertising campaign.

When it comes to advertising, personas can help in all of the above advertising functions. For example, you can use personas in targeting, to select the customers who receive your company’s marketing messages. Moreover, personas can also be used for message creation – ideally, personas result in more personal ad copy texts that are resonating well with the target audience that the persona represents. Similarly, by knowing in which channels the persona most spends his or her time, you can choose the appropriate channels for advertising strategy.

Finally, you can report the results by persona, e.g., “Mary was the most recipient to our new campaign on Dinner in the Dark products, while David most enjoyed the Flight experience campaign”.

More articles on persona use cases

Jansen, B. J., Salminen, J., and Jung, S.G. (2020) Data-Driven Personas for Enhanced User Understanding: Combining Empathy with Rationality for Better Insights to Analytics. Data and Information Management. 4(1), 1-17.  https://content.sciendo.com/view/journals/dim/4/1/article-p1.xml