Personas are often created based on user interviews. Yet, researchers rarely make their interview questions publicly available or justify how they were chosen. In this research, lead by Joni Salminen, we manually extract 276 interview questions and categorize them into 10 themes. The 10 theme taxonomy was created based on abduction, i.e., a qualitative technique […]
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 »
We compare a data-driven persona system and an analytics system for efficiency and effectiveness for a user identification task. Findings from the 34-participant experiment show that the data-driven persona system affords faster task completion, is easier for users to engage with, and provides better user identification accuracy. Eye-tracking data indicates that the participants focus most
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 »
Though photographs of real people are typically used to portray personas, there is little research into the potential advantages or disadvantages of using such images, relative to other image styles. In this research, lead by Joni Salminen, we conducted an experiment with 149 participants, testing the effects of six different image styles on user perceptions
Picturing It!: The Effect of Image Styles on User Perceptions of Personas Read More »
