The Persona BlogAutomatic Persona Generation (APG) is a system developed by the persona research team at Qatar Computing Research Institute. APG is defined both as a methodology and a system for automatic creation of personas from online analytics data.
Automatic Persona Generation has specifically been developed to address the limitations of manual persona creation. This blog post details the main benefits of data-driven personas compared to manually created personas.
Personas are fictional characters or ‘profiles’ that portray a certain type of customer or user.
The development of a persona should go beyond just providing background information on the organization’s ideal customers. The persona profile should also include other features, such as current behaviors the persona exihibits as well as goals and expectations. A detailed persona can help identify the right target audience, but more importantly, it forces the consideration of the user in the design and implementation of a product.
In this post, I’m exploring the usefulness of personas in the era of digital analytics. At Qatar Computing Research Institute, we have developed a system for automatic persona generation (APG) – see the demo. Under the leadership of Professor Jim Jansen, we’re constantly working to position this persona system at the intersection of customer profiles, personas, and online analytics.
Personas are imaginary people representing the core audience or customers of a company or organization. Personas were introduced into software development and marketing in the 1990s. Personas capture and describe key elements of customer segments so that decision makers could better understand their users or customers, not only by using numbers but also by referring to qualitative user attributes, such as key pain points and desires, needs and wants.