Use of Personas

Personas for your non-customers – the Edge, the Refuse, and Unknown non-customers

By / October 4, 2022

Personas can be a force multiplier in reaching your three categories of non-customers – the Edge Non-customers, the Refuse Non-customers, and Unknown Non-customers. Algorithmically-Generated Personas are great for humanized representation of your existing customers presented in understandable chunks of information. These data-driven personas are great for team communication while creating content and designing systems, along …

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How does varying the number of personas affect user perceptions and behavior? Challenging the ‘small personas’ hypothesis!

By / August 29, 2022

Studies in human-computer interaction recommend creating fewer than ten personas based on stakeholders’ limitations to cognitively process and use personas. However, no existing studies offer empirical support for having fewer rather than more personas. Investigating this matter, thirty-seven participants interacted with five and fifteen personas using an interactive persona system, choosing one persona to design …

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When Personas Are Not Needed

By / September 19, 2021

When are personas not needed? Perhaps in many cases, but one example is Netflix. See this picture: In situation like this, when recommendations or personalizations can be made automatically at scale, there seems to be no need for an additional aggregation layer such as personas. Personas are only needed if we start asking collective, not …

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Nine Things People Get Wrong About Personas

By / October 17, 2021

Without further ado, here are nine things that people often get wrong about personas (based on our experience): Personas are not based on real data. WRONG! This misconception stems from the era when personas were predominantly created based on interviews. The thing is, interviews are also real data. But, nonetheless, the argument was that since …

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Tactical Personas (i.e., “I have personas, now what?”)

By / April 4, 2021

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 …

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Pain Points and Personas

By / June 24, 2021

In this article, I share insights into what are pain points and how can personas — and more specifically the Automatic Persona Generation (APG) system that was built by our team help identify customer pain points.  Expressing customers with pain points as customer personas can contribute to developing better products and services, ultimately leading to …

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