Data-Driven Personas

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xxviii

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2. Getting Ready

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 1-1

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   2. The Data-Driven Persona Revolution

      • Bernard J. Jansen, Joni Salminen, Soon-gyo Jung, Kathleen Guan

      Pages 3-27

   3. Getting Your Organization Data-Driven Persona Ready

      • Bernard J. Jansen, Joni Salminen, Soon-gyo Jung, Kathleen Guan

      Pages 29-60

3. Developing Data-Driven Personas

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 61-61

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   2. Getting Meaningful Data

      • Bernard J. Jansen, Joni Salminen, Soon-gyo Jung, Kathleen Guan

      Pages 63-91

   3. Creating Data-Driven Personas

      • Bernard J. Jansen, Joni Salminen, Soon-gyo Jung, Kathleen Guan

      Pages 93-118

   4. Data-Driven Personas as Interfaces for Persona Analytics System

      • Bernard J. Jansen, Joni Salminen, Soon-gyo Jung, Kathleen Guan

      Pages 119-135

4. Using Data-Driven Personas

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 137-137

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   2. Challenges of Applying Data-Driven Persona Development

      • Bernard J. Jansen, Joni Salminen, Soon-gyo Jung, Kathleen Guan

      Pages 139-158

   3. Use Cases for Data-Driven Personas

      • Bernard J. Jansen, Joni Salminen, Soon-gyo Jung, Kathleen Guan

      Pages 159-185

   4. Using Data-Driven Personas Alongside Other Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) Techniques

      • Bernard J. Jansen, Joni Salminen, Soon-gyo Jung, Kathleen Guan

      Pages 187-205

5. Evaluating Data-Driven Personas and the Road Ahead

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 207-207

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   2. Evaluating Data-Driven Personas

      • Bernard J. Jansen, Joni Salminen, Soon-gyo Jung, Kathleen Guan

      Pages 209-237

   3. Selecting the Appropriate Persona Creation Method

      • Bernard J. Jansen, Joni Salminen, Soon-gyo Jung, Kathleen Guan

      Pages 239-259

6. Data-Driven Personas and the Future

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 261-261

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   2. Conclusion: Dispelling Myths and Laying Out the Grand Challenges of Data-Driven Personas

      • Bernard J. Jansen, Joni Salminen, Soon-gyo Jung, Kathleen Guan

      Pages 263-275

7. Back Matter

   Pages 277-317

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Data-driven personas are a significant advancement in the fields of human-centered informatics and human-computer interaction. Data-driven personas enhance user understanding by combining the empathy inherent with personas with the rationality inherent in analytics using computational methods. Via the employment of these computational methods, the data-driven persona method permits the use of large-scale user data, which is a novel advancement in persona creation. A common approach for increasing stakeholder engagement about audiences, customers, or users, persona creation remained relatively unchanged for several decades. However, the availability of digital user data, data science algorithms, and easy access to analytics platforms provide avenues and opportunities to enhance personas from often sketchy representations of user segments to precise, actionable, interactive decision-making tools—data-driven personas! Using the data-driven approach, the persona profile can serve as an interface to a fully functional analytics system that can present user representation at various levels of information granularity for more task-aligned user insights. We trace the techniques that have enabled the development of data-driven personas and then conceptually frame how one can leverage data-driven personas as tools for both empathizing with and understanding of users. Presenting a conceptual framework consisting of (a) persona benefits, (b) analytics benefits, and (c) decision-making outcomes, we illustrate applying this framework via practical use cases in areas of system design, digital marketing, and content creation to demonstrate the application of data-driven personas in practical applied situations. We then present an overview of a fully functional data-driven persona system as an example of multi-level information aggregation needed for decision making about users. We demonstrate that data-driven personas systems can provide critical, empathetic, and user understanding functionalities for anyone needing such insights.

• Qatar Computing Research Institute, Hamad Bin Khalifa University, Doha, Qatar

  Bernard J. Jansen, Joni Salminen, Soon-gyo Jung

• Turku School of Economics at the University of Turku, Turku, Finland

  Joni Salminen

• University College London, London, United Kingdom

  Kathleen Guan

Bernard J. Jansen is currently a Principal Scientist in the social computing group of the Qatar Computing Research Institute. He is a graduate of West Point and has a Ph.D. in computer science from Texas A&M University. Professor Jansen is Editor-in-Chief of the journal, Information Processing and Management (Elsevier).Joni Salminen is currently a research scientist at Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU, and at Turku School of Economics. His current research interests include automatic persona generation from social media and online analytics data, the societal impact of machine decision making (#algoritmitutkimus), and related social computing topics.Soon-gyo Jung is a software engineer focused on news/data analytics and implementing related systems at Qatar Computing Research Institute. He received a B.E. degree in computer software from the Kwangwoon University, Seoul, Korea, in 2014, and an M.S. degree in electrical and computer engineering from the Sungkyunkwan University, Suwon, Korea, in 2016.Kathleen Guan is currently a graduate student with the University College London. She has a Bachelor of Science in Foreign Service in International Law from Georgetown University, and research training in Public Health from Johns Hopkins University. In addition to research consulting for industry, Kathleen is currently a research student in Neuroscience and Psychopathology through a joint graduate program between University College London and Yale School of Medicine.