Data-Driven Personas for Enhanced User Understanding: Combining Empathy with Rationality for Better Insights to Analytics

Abstract

Persona is a common human-computer interaction technique for increasing stakeholders’ understanding of audiences, customers, or users. Applied in many domains, such as e-commerce, health, marketing, software development, and system design, personas have remained relatively unchanged for several decades. However, with the increasing popularity of digital user data and data science algorithms, there are new opportunities to progressively shift personas from general representations of user segments to precise interactive tools for decision-making. In this vision, the persona profile functions as an interface to a fully functional analytics system. With this research, we conceptually investigate how data-driven personas can be leveraged as analytics tools for understanding users. We present a conceptual framework consisting of (a) persona benefits, (b) analytics benefits, and (c) decision-making outcomes. We apply this framework for an analysis of digital marketing use cases to demonstrate how data-driven personas can be leveraged in practical situations. We then present a functional overview of an actual data-driven persona system that relies on the concept of data aggregation in which the fundamental question defines the unit of analysis for decision-making. The system provides several functionalities for stakeholders within organizations to address this question.

Strengths and Weaknesses of Persona Creation Methods: Guidelines and Opportunities for Digital Innovations

“…Personas have broad applicability for digital innovation, giving their applicability for humancentered user understanding in activities such as product development, design, testing, and marketing. The persona technique has inherent advantages relative to other user analytics techniques, in that persona provides a human face to "cold" numbers [46]. However, there is considerable plurality when it comes to persona creation methods, which may be confusing, especially those new to personas.…”

“…Identifying and segmenting student needs in elearning and remote education [88] towards improvement of learning processes and outcomes 4. Increasing managers' immersion with user data by making the personas responsive and interactive to end-user queries [46], merging digital assistants with personas and offering voice-and text-based user interfaces [52] 5. Mapping stakeholder needs for requirements engineering before starting the project and communicating these as personas that safeguard anonymity and facilitate dealing with sensitive topics -the more diverse the stakeholder groups are, the more useful personas can be (e.g., for global projects [66]) in reducing uncertainty, aligning expectations, and helping "name the pain" [25] 6.…”

Enhanced Dialog between Formal and Informal Caregivers: Following a User-centered Design for Personas' Development

“…User personas offer the potential to ''humanize'' and replace quantitative data with people-based data re ections that individuals inherently empathize with [34]. More speci cally, articulate personas form useful, rounded and realistic representations of the underlying target group that exist in real life and provide empathetic and expansive bene ts [35].…”

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

“…Personas make it possible for decision makers to see use cases 'through the eyes of the user' (Goodwin 2009) and facilitate communication between team members through shared mental models (Pruitt and Adlin 2006). Researchers are increasingly developing methodologies for DDPs (McGinn and Kotamraju 2008;Zhang, Brown, and Shankar 2016) and automatic persona generation (An et al 2018a;An et al 2018b), mainly due to the increase in the availability of online user data and to increase the robustness of personas given the alternative forms of user understanding (Jansen, Salminen, and Jung 2020). DDPs typically leverage quantitative social media and online analytics data to create personas that represent users or customers of a specific channel 1 (Salminen et al 2017).…”