Are personas done? Evaluating their usefulness in the age of digital analytics

Abstract

In this critique, we conceptually examine the use of personas in an age of availability of large-scale online analytics data. Based on the criticism and benefits outlined in prior work, we formulate the major arguments for and against the use of personas, analyze these arguments, and demonstrate areas for the productive employment of personas by leveraging digital analytics data in their creation. From our review of the prior literature and the given availability of online customer data, our key tenet is that personas are located between aggregated and individual statistics. At their best, personas capture the coverage of the customer base attributed to aggregated data representations while retaining the interpretability of individual-level analytics. Persona creation benefits from both novel computational techniques and data sources. To demonstrate this, we propose and implement automatically generated personas primarily based on quantitative data. We also review key persona validation issues and examine how these issues can be addressed with automated persona generation using real user data from online analytics platforms. Finally, we outline areas of future research in the persona domain within the field of digital marketing and advertising. Overall, to survive in the rapidly developing marketing industry and online customer analytics, personas must evolve by adopting new practices. There are implications for this evolution of personas in a variety of domains, including design, content creation, and digital marketing.

Using artificially generated pictures in customer-facing systems: an evaluation study with data-driven personas

“…A persona is a fictive person that describes a user or customer segment (Cooper 1999). Originating from HCI, personas are used in various domains, such as user experience/design (Matthews, Judge, and Whittaker 2012), marketing (Jenkinson 1994), and online analytics (Salminen et al 2018b) to increase the empathy by designers, software developers, marketers (etc.) toward the users or customers of a product (Dong, Kelkar, and Braun 2007).…”

“…The advantage of DDPs, relative to traditional personas (Brangier and Bornet 2011) that are manually created and typically include 3-7 personas per set (Hong et al 2018), is that one can create hundreds of DDPs from the data to reflect different behavioural and demographic nuances in the underlying user population (Salminen et al 2018b). For example, a news organisation distributing its contents in social media platforms to audiences originating from dozens of countries can have dozens of audience segments relevant for different decision-making scenarios in other geographic areas (Salminen et al 2018e).…”

A Typology of Persona as Suggested by Jungian Theory and the Evolving Persona Studies Literature

“…A special issue (or section) was devoted to this kind of persona in volume 4, issue 2 of Persona Studies, considering the use of personas in architectural design as well as IT (Nielsen, 2018), and was also the subject of an earlier paper that discussed the use of persona to inform the design of Twitter (Humphrey 2017). Although these strategic fictional personas are designed from data collected through extensive research (analytics and user interviews, typically), both Humphrey (2017) and Salminen et al (2018) argue that, in practice, they are usually derived more from analytics and design company's assumptions than from the richer, more in-depth qualitative data, and as a result are often not representative of many potential product users. Humphrey (2017) suggests that persona studies' focus on digital personas is highly appropriate, since all Twitter users are effectively modelling themselves on the principles of persona construction used in software design.…”

Capturing the change in topical interests of personas over time

“…It is this last concern, the change in topical interests of personas, that we investigate in this research. Despite the routinely stated critique of personas changing over time (Chapman, Love, Milham, Elrif, & Alford, ; Chapman & Milham, ; Salminen, Kwak, An, Jung, & Jansen, ), we could locate no specific research investigating whether changes in content interests of audience segments, as represented by personas, actually do become outdated. Similarly, there is a lack of research determining how frequently interests do change, if they change at all.…”