Persona systems (also known as ‘interactive persona systems’) are online, web-based systems that enable end-users like designers, software developers, marketers, and business analysts access personas created from datasets that these end-users provide. Persona systems first generate the personas from the data, either completely automatically or based on the end-user inputs. Then, persona systems show the personas to the end-users and allow the end-users to interact with the personas, using functions like search, filter, prediction, or chat.
The first full end-to-end persona system (i.e., containing the whole process of persona creation from automatic data collection to persona generation and provision) was known as Automatic Persona Generation (APG). This system accesses online analytics and social media user data from platforms like Google Analytics, YouTube Analytics, Facebook Insights, and so on. The data is obtained via a channel owner’s permission and in accordance with the terms of services in these platforms, leveraging the platforms’ official application programming interfaces (APIs). APG then transforms the user data into an interaction matrix to which it applies non-negative matrix factorization (NMF). After this segmentation step, APG enriches the segments obtained from NMF with additional content and information, such as picture, name, and topics of interest. You can access APG here.
APG was later morphed into the Audience, Customer, and User Analytics (ACUA) system. In addition to persona generation, ACUA contains other analytics features, including dashboards and reports. You can access ACUA here.
In addition to these two persona systems, there is a third one. This is called Survey2Persona (S2P) and, as the name indicates, this system generates personas using survey data obtained from questionnaires. S2P has multiple segmentation (clustering) algorithms for different data types, and it also uses Generative AI in the persona creation process. You access S2P here.
- Automatic Persona Generation: https://persona.qcri.org/
- Audience, Customer, and User Analytics: https://acua.qcri.org/
- Survey2Persona: https://s2p.qcri.org/
To learn more about these persona systems, visit the websites above. For commercial and research collaboration, please contact Dr. Jim Jansen, Principal Scientist at Qatar Computing Research Institute, email: bjansen (at) hbku.edu.qa.