Research has found that the concept of “persona” is predominantly deployed in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) studies, but there is a stream of Natural Language Processing (NLP) studies that also refer to the concept of persona. This post aims at making a conceptual distinction in these two different types of referring to personas. First, HCI studies […]
NLP vs. HCI Personas: What’s the Difference? Read More »
Research has focused on measuring persona perceptions, i.e., what users think of personas they are shown. These efforts can focus on individual personas, i.e., we show a persona or two to the user and ask their opinions about the persona’s usefulness, completeness, credibility, and so (see the Persona Perception Scale). However, persona sets (i.e., groups
Measuring personas or persona sets? Read More »
When planning persona studies and experiments, one challenging aspect is task creation. In other words, what do we ask the participants to do with the personas? I’m writing this post to provide some answers to this perennial question of persona task design. Persona Task Types Overall, we can categorize persona tasks into four main types:
User Tasks for Empirical Persona Research Read More »
Anna Holopainen asked this question on LinkedIn: What’s wrong with most buyer personas? Aka my favorite pet peeve 👇 She also provided an answer straight away, listing the following points. In the following, Anna’s points are shown in bold text, followed by my response in unbolded text. I found these points very fruitful for a
What’s Wrong with Personas? A Rebuttal to a Fair Question! Read More »
Without further ado, here are nine things that people often get wrong about personas (based on our experience): Personas are not based on real data. WRONG! This misconception stems from the era when personas were predominantly created based on interviews. The thing is, interviews are also real data. But, nonetheless, the argument was that since
Nine Things People Get Wrong About Personas Read More »
The problem with mean-centered personas (i.e., those that describe average, typical users) is the general problem with the mean: if half of your users are right-handed and half are left-handed, should your persona be middle-handed?
No Persona is Average: The Problem with Mean-Centered Personas Read More »
People sometimes struggle to understand what we mean by personas. This is because there are two alternative definitions to personas. This blog posts explains each of these definitions. The Social Psychology Definition of Personas A persona can refer to public image, public identity, self-representation, or impression management. That is, a persona is how one wants themselves
The two (most distinct) definitions of personas Read More »
