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 …
Derived from the notion of algorithmic bias, it is possible that creating user segments such as personas from data results in over- or under-representing certain segments (FAIRNESS), does not properly represent the diversity of the user populations (DIVERSITY), or produces inconsistent results when hyperparameters are changed (CONSISTENCY). Collecting user data on 363M video views from …
“Any dataset can be a persona.” It’s quite a fascinating idea that any dataset about users or customers could be transformed into a set of personas. Of course, this means that persona creators need to possess a wide range of analytical skills because datasets in the wild contain different fields/variables/degree of structure. So, persona creation …
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 …
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 …
We often get questions from prospective clients about how to use personas. Like, “okay, after I have these personas, then what? How can I use them?“. I have two standard responses for this: Persona analytics is just like any analytics. If you want to understand your customers, there must be some reason for that. What …
Tactical Personas (i.e., “I have personas, now what?”) Read More »
In this blog post, the APG team and Kathleen Guan join to summarize some key aspects in the theory of “why personas work,” grounded in notions from social psychology. Enjoy reading! Introduction to Theory of Personas How do people form a connection with personas? What information plays a role? When does connecting take place? When …
