The Personification of Big Data

Abstract

Organizations all over the world, both national and international, gather demographic data so that the progress of nations and peoples can be tracked. This data is often made available to the public in the form of aggregated national level data or individual responses (microdata). Product designers likewise conduct surveys to better understand their customer and create personas. Personas are archetypes of the individuals who will use, maintain, sell or otherwise be affected by the products created by designers. Personas help designers better understand the person the product is designed for. Unfortunately, the process of collecting customer information and creating personas is often a slow and expensive process. In this paper, we introduce a new method of creating personas, leveraging publicly available databanks of both aggregated national level and information on individuals in the population. A computational persona generator is introduced that creates a population of personas that mirrors a real population in terms of size and statistics. Realistic individual personas are filtered from this population for use in product development.

How Does Personification Impact Ad Performance and Empathy? An Experiment with Online Advertising

“…The prototype level system did not provide user quotes and goals required for rounded personas. In other words, rather than corresponding with the notion of rounded personas (Nielsen, 2019), the personification we apply corresponds more with the notion of prototype personas (Estell & Reid, 2010) or skeletal personas (Stevenson & Mattson, 2019) from the HCI literature. However, even these less detailed PUGs are worth testing, as they provide the critical personification of name and face.…”

“…The increase of data analytics tools and platforms has led to the availability of "personified big data" on online users (Stevenson & Mattson, 2019), i.e., user statistics and metrics that describe online user behavior. This personified user data enables "transferring complex market research data into (…) archetype customers."…”

Tangible futures: Combining scenario thinking and personas - A pilot study on urban mobility

“…Using a different approach, Gonzalez de Heredia et al (2018) presented three structured methods for developing personas closer to empirical data: collecting new survey data; clustering existing data from multiple surveys; iterating between interviews with a small sample of people linked with survey data. Stevenson and Mattson (2019) recently proposed to increase the accuracy of personas by creating a computational persona generator, based on aggregated national survey data and individual micro-data. The method was applied to define a persona population of representative motorcycle taxi drivers in Brazil.…”

“…Even though we developed several very different individual perspectives, it may be necessary to develop a more diverse set of narratives to create a fine-grained coverage. This perspective could for instance be supported by the generation of representative persona in the spirit of the 'persona generator' (Stevenson & Mattson, 2019). Personas and narratives could hence be developed with a targeted selection of participants, from a variety of backgrounds depending on the design goals we have in mind.…”

“…The generation of relevant representative personas could be inspired by quantitative methods based on surveys, or mixed methods based on interviews and surveys, as e.g. by Gonzalez de Heredia et al (2018) or Stevenson and Mattson (2019). Furthermore, the pilot study did not include the development or discussion of scenarios in the group, which could be a limit to the co-creation approach.…”