Abstract
The persona approach is a communicative design technique for understanding users. With increasing access to analytics data, personas are more and more generated from online user statistics using big data and algorithmic approaches. This integration offers new opportunities to shift personas from flat files of data presentation to that of interactive interfaces for analytics systems. We illustrate this transition towards the concept of “persona as interface” with a persona analytics system, Automatic Persona Generation (APG). In pushing advancements of both persona and analytics conceptualization, development, and use, the APG system presents a multi-layered “full-stack” integration. APG affords three levels of user data presentation, which are (a) the conceptual persona, (b) the analytical user metrics, and (c) the foundational user data. Moving to a “personas as interfaces” approach offers the benefits of both personas and analytics systems and addresses some of the shortcomings of each. We provide results from user experiments of and use cases for APG. The result is a better tool than either persona or analytics along for user understanding.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | e215 |
| Journal | Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology |
| Volume | 57 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 2020 |
Keywords
- data-driven personas
- design methods
- persona development
- personas
- user understanding
- web analytics