The following is a post from the APG Team’s summer 2020 intern, Jaad Mohammed.
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If you ever thought how the APG system assigns a name to a data-driven persona, you’ve come to the right place.
Since personas are representations of a typical user segment for a product’s current customer base, the persona needs a name! Nothing could make a persona feel more like a real person than giving it a name.
Below, we walk you through basics of what APG does to create a persona and to assign a name to the persona profile.
First and foremost, we need some kind of statistical data that our persona represents. For this, APG leverages privacy-preserving aggregated data of user interactions with product content posted on major online social media and other analytics platforms, such as Facebook, YouTube, and Google Analytics, etc. [1].
Now with this data APG implements a sequential approach to automatically generate personas that consists:
- Identifying the distinct user interaction patterns from the data set,
- Linking these distinct user interaction patterns to the set of user demographic groups,
- Identifying impactful user demographic groups from the data set,
- Creating shell personas via demographic attributes, and
- Enriching these shell personas to create detailed persona descriptions.
To get a more detailed understanding of our process, you can head over to [2]
Now that we have gathered the bases for the creation of persona (i.e., base persona), we can add personality to it by giving it a name.
We have built a dictionary of names by collecting popular names by gender and year of countries. For example, the top 1,000 popular baby names any year since 1879 (https://www.ssa.gov/oact/babynames/) is available for the US. Then, through age group, gender, and location of a representative group, we can assign a temporal, gender, and ethnically appropriate name to a persona.
For example, for a 25-year-old female from India, APG can access common baby names for Indian females born twenty-five years ago and use that information for naming the persona.
APG is automatically this whole name assignment process even further!
Reference
- Jung, S., An, J., Kwak, H., Ahmad, M., Nielsen, L., and Jansen, B. J. (2017) Persona Generation from Aggregated Social Media Data. ACM Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2017 (CHI2017). Denver, Colorado. p. 1748-1755. 6-11 May.
- Jung, S.G., Salminen, J., Kwak, H., An, J., and Jansen, B. J. (2018) Automatic Persona Generation (APG): A Rationale and Demonstration, ACM SIGIR Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval (CHIIR2018) (Demo), New Brunswick, New Jersey, USA, 11-15 March.