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

Abstract

Persona is a technique for enhancing user understanding and improving the user-centered design of digital products. Persona creation has traditionally been divided into Qualitative, Quantitative, and Mixed Methods approaches. However, no literature systematically contrasts the strengths and weaknesses of these approaches. We review the literature to map the strengths and weaknesses of these approaches and evaluate the potential of personas for the domain of digital innovation. We provide insights for better creation and use of personas by both researchers and practitioners, especially those that are new to personas, deploying personas in a new domain, or familiar with only one of the persona creation approaches.

Generating user-driven patient personas to support preventive health care activities of rural-living unattached patients

“…While co-design personas have been previously used, no description of the persona development process was provided [ 29 ], limiting the replicability of their approach. This further highlights critiques of persona methodologies as lacking verifiability [ 17 , 18 ]. It is therefore all the more critical to provide detailed reporting of persona methods [ 28 ], as this paper has done.…”

“…Patterns emerge from combinations of identified relevant variables, such as activities, attitudes, aptitudes, motivations, and skills [ 7 ]. In persona methodology, patterns can be identified through segmentation analysis to designate “relevant user segments,” which are then enhanced with more in-depth detail, such as pictures and quotes [ 17 , 18 ].…”

“…Quantitative strategies for persona development using existing data offer accessible approaches for employment by health care service teams [ 18 ]. However, few quantitative developed personas have included targeted end users in the final step of enhancing user segments, which could result in disconnection between the personas and end users [ 18 ]. Further, often vague reporting of the persona development process in the literature has limited the rigour and replicability of development processes.…”

Towards a Measurement Scale of Organizational Readiness for Personas

“…Criticism of personas is common and involves, e.g., the lack of methodological robustness, small sample sizes, lack of accuracy and precision, difficulty of evaluation, and unproven use cases and benefits [9,14,19,30,41,44]. More importantly, demonstrating real value from personas has proven to be difficult.…”

“…While there certainly can be methodological challenges in how personas are created [19], as well as challenges in terms of personas being vulnerable to overgeneralization and stereotypes [27,28], it is also true that personas are often not properly implemented [40,41]. For instance, Rönkkö et al [41] report a case where applying personas to a software development project failed, specifically arguing that "The problem was not with the user; socio-political factors in the branch in which the software was developed proved to be of much greater importance."…”