Joni Salminen

Dr. Joni Salminen works as a Scientist at Qatar Computing Research Institute, Hamad Bin Khalifa University, and as a Postdoctoral Researcher at Turku School of Economics, University of Turku. His research interests are heavily focused on personas, including topics such as automatic persona generation from social media data (YouTube, Facebook, Google Analytics), persona perceptions, biases in data-driven personas, optimal number of personas, etc.

Introduction to Using Personas for Online Advertising

Personas are fictitious people representing real customer groups, i.e., different types (e.g., most valuable, most loyal, most responsive – or the least valuable, etc.). Most typically, personas are presented to decision makers as persona profiles, i.e., narrative representations of different kinds of users belonging to a particular demographic, behavior, and/or attitude involved in using a …

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Merging Intelligent Systems and Personas for Online Advertising

This post will explore some central ideas on bridging the divide between personas and intelligent systems in the context of online advertising. The current state-of-the-art persona systems are interactive, but they are not intelligent. Hence, the goal is to move from interactive persona systems to intelligent persona systems — “intelligent” includes interactive by definition but …

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There Will Always Be Subpersonas

One of the main challenges in creating personas is deciding “where to draw the line”, i.e., making judgment calls of what information to include into the persona profiles and how many personas to create. Ideally, we’d include all the information that the eventual persona users need and nothing else. Ideally, we’d create as many personas …

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Ideas for Persona Research Using Quantitative User Analytics

What Are Personas and Why Should We Care? Personas, commonly applied in human-computer interaction (HCI) (Cooper, 1999), design (Aoyama, 2007), and business domains such as marketing and sales (Salminen et al., 2018), are fictional depictions of end-users, patients, customers, or other groups of interest (Cooper, 1999). Personas are cited to have many benefits, at least …

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