Our research team has conducted a series of research studies examining when and how organizations can effectively use personas.
Some findings are:
(a) Personas for social good are primarily exploratory and focused on initial methodology development.
(b) We develop and validate the Persona Readiness Scale (PRS), a survey instrument to measure organizational readiness for personas. Confirmatory factor analysis indicated a good fit with five dimensions: Culture readiness, Knowledge readiness, Data and systems readiness, Capability readiness, and Goal readiness.
(c) The choice of algorithm is a crucial step in data-driven user segmentation because the algorithm fundamentally impacts the demographic attributes of the generated personas and thus influences how decision-makers view the user population.
(d) There are a plethora of issues that plague the implementation of data-driven personas within organizations.
(e) We outline and discuss details of a three-step data-driven-personas process consisting of educate, invest, and employ.
Read the full research articles!
Guan, K., Salminen, J. Jung, S.G., and Jansen, B. J. (2023) Leveraging Personas for Social Impact: A Review of Their Applications to Social Good in Design. International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction. DOI: 10.1080/10447318.2023.2247568
Salminen, J. O., Nielsen, L., Bahloul, M., Jørgensen, R.G., Santos, J. M., Jung, S.G., and Jansen, B. J. (2022). Persona Preparedness: A Survey Instrument for Measuring the Organizational Readiness for Deploying Personas. Information Technology and Management.
Salminen, J. O., Chhirang, K., Jung, S.G., Thirumuruganathan, S., Guan, K. W., and Jansen, B. J. (2022) Big Data, Small Personas: How Algorithms Shape the Demographic Representation of Data-Driven User Segments. Big Data. 10(4), 313–336. https://doi.org/10.1089/big.2021.0177
Salminen, J. O., Jung, S.G., and Jansen, B. J. (2021) Are Data-Driven Personas Considered Harmful?: Diversifying user understandings with more than algorithms. Persona Studies, 7(1), 48–63. https://doi.org/10.21153/psj2021vol7no1art1236
Jansen, B. J., Salminen, J., Jung, S.G., and Guan, K. (2021). Data-Driven Personas. Synthesis Lectures on Human-Centered Informatics, Carroll, J. (Ed). Springer Link, i-317.