Personas & Analytics
These two paradigms have developed in parallel but mostly separately. Often at odds with each other due to the advocates of each.
However, both paradigms have the same goal – enhanced customer understanding!
Why separate them? Persona analytics finally brings them together!
What are personas? analytics?
Personas can be can be understood as humanized profiles of customer segments.
Analytics can be can be understood as numerical insights about customer segments.
Personas positives are that they are empathic relatable views of the customer . The negatives are they are often non-actionable. Great for customer understanding. Not so good at specific KPIs and campaigns.
Analytics positives are it is actionable and precise. Negatives are it is difficult for those without skill sets or inclination to acquire the skills, cold numbers, and not the customer . Great for personalization. Not so good at actual customer understanding.
Persona Analytics
Our research team, the APG Team, is pursuing research to merge these two paradigms – persona analytics!
Persona analytics – algorithmically creates data-driven personas from large amounts of online customer analytics data. The end product are casts of accurate data-driven personas that are precise representations of the analytics data.
Integrating better data-driven personas and better analyzed analytics leads to better decisions!
Better decisions lead to better business results!
Let’s make it happen!
Interested in employing persona analytics for your project, organization, or business? Contact the APG Team (qcri.personas.contact@gmail.com).
Research
Here is some of the persona analytics research that the APG Team and collaborators have produced so far! More to come!
Salminen, J., Kaate, I., Sayed Kamel, A., Jung, S.G., and Jansen, B. J. (2021) How Does Personification Impact Ad Performance and Empathy? An Experiment with Online Advertising, International Journal of Human–Computer Interaction, 37:2, 141-155, DOI: 10.1080/10447318.2020.1809246
Jansen, B. J., Salminen, J. O., & Jung, S. (2020). Making Meaningful User Segments from Datasets Using Product Dissemination and Product Impact. Data and Information Management. doi: https://doi.org/10.2478/dim-2020-0048
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
An, J., Kwak, H., Salminen, J., Jung, S.G., and Jansen, B. J. (2018) Imaginary People Representing Real Numbers: Generating Personas from Online Social Media Data. ACM Transactions on the Web. 12, 4, Article 27.
An, J., Kwak, H., Salminen, J., Jung, S.G., and Jansen, B. J. (2018) Customer segmentation using online platforms: isolating behavioral and demographic segments for persona creation via aggregated user data. Social Network Analysis and Mining. 8(1), 54.
Jansen, B. J., Jung, S.G., and Salminen, J. (2020) From Flat File to Interface: Conceptual Synthesis of Personas and Analytics for Enhanced User Understanding. 83rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Information Science and Technology. Pittsburgh, PA, USA, 23-28 October. 1-11.
Salminen, J., Jung, S.G., Chowdury, S.A., and Jansen, B. J. (2020) Rethinking Personas for Fairness: Algorithmic Transparency and Accountability in Data-Driven Personas. 22nd International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (HCII2020). Copenhagen, Denmark, 19-24 July 2020. 82-100.
Salminen, J., Rao, R.G., Jung, S.G., Chowdury, S.A., and Jansen, B. J. (2020) Enriching Social Media Personas with Personality Traits: A Deep Learning Approach Using the Big Five Classes. 22nd International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (HCII2020). Copenhagen, Denmark, 19-24 July 2020. 101-120.
Salminen, J., Jung, S.G., Chowdhury. S., and Jansen, B. J. (2020) Analyzing Demographic Bias in Artificially Generated Facial Pictures. ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI’20) (Extended Abstract), Honolulu, HI, USA. 25–30 April, 1-8.
Salminen, J., Froneman, W., Jung, S.G., Chowdhury. S., and Jansen, B. J. (2020) The Ethics of Data-Driven Personas. ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI’20) (Extended Abstract), Honolulu, HI, USA. 25–30 April, 1-9.
Salminen, J., Jung, S.G., Chowdhury, S. Şengün, S., and Jansen, B. J. (2020) Personas and Analytics: A Comparative User Study of Efficiency and Effectiveness for a User Identification Task. ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI’20), Honolulu, HI, USA. 25–30 April, 1-13.