Article

Persona Perception Scale: Development and Exploratory Validation of an Instrument for Evaluating Individuals’ Perceptions of Personas

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Abstract

Although used in many domains, the evaluation of personas is difficult due to the lack of validated measurement instruments. To tackle this challenge, we propose the Persona Perception Scale (PPS), a survey instrument for evaluating how individuals perceive personas. We develop the scale by reviewing relevant literature from social psychology, persona studies, and Human-Computer Interaction to find relevant constructs and items for measuring persona perceptions. Following initial pilot testing, we conduct an exploratory validation of the scale with 412 respondents and find that the constructs and items of the scale perform satisfactorily for deployment. The research has implications for both academic researchers and persona developers. Using the PPS, researchers and designers can evaluate how different persona designs affect individual perceptions of personas, for example persona users’ (e.g., designers, marketers, software developers) perceived credibility of the persona and their willingness to use it. Because persona perceptions are associated with persona acceptance and adoption, using a perceptual measurement instrument can improve the chances of persona adoption and use in real organizations.

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... One of the methods that can be used to create representations of the users (i.e., their needs, requirements, and expectations) is the Persona development. Salminen et al. [34] define Personas as imaginary persons describing a user group, which are typically used in the exploration phases of product development, when developers are researching who their users are. Personas serve the purpose of keeping the focus on the relevant user group that will potentially use the product [35]. ...
... Personas serve the purpose of keeping the focus on the relevant user group that will potentially use the product [35]. The development of Personas as a user segmentation technique is used in various fields, such as design, marketing, software development, and health informatics [34]. In this research, we focus on Personas that are relevant to DHIs dedicated to obesity management and prevention. ...
... Following this, we sought additional input from experts in several sessions to refine the Persona list and create the Persona descriptions. The second step was the quantitative evaluation of Personas with the Persona Perception Scale (PPS) [34], which was similar to the method described below. ...
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This study investigates the perceptions of Persona descriptions generated using three different large language models (LLMs) and qualitatively developed Personas by an expert panel involved in obesity research. Six different Personas were defined, three from the clinical domain and three from the educational domain. The descriptions of Personas were generated using qualitative methods and the LLMs (i.e., Bard, Llama, and ChatGPT). The perception of the developed Personas was evaluated by experts in the respective fields. The results show that, in general, the perception of Personas did not significantly differ between those generated using LLMs and those qualitatively developed by human experts. This indicates that LLMs have the potential to generate a consistent and valid representation of human stakeholders. The LLM-generated Personas were perceived as believable, relatable, and informative. However, post-hoc comparisons revealed some differences, with descriptions generated using the Bard model being in several Persona descriptions that were evaluated most favorably in terms of empathy, likability, and clarity. This study contributes to the understanding of the potential and challenges of LLM-generated Personas. Although the study focuses on obesity research, it highlights the importance of considering the specific context and the potential issues that researchers should be aware of when using generative AI for generating Personas.
... They are applied as a method chiefly in the early stages of designing to stimulate and direct ideation but also at the end stages of the process of communicating important information (Salminen et al., 2022). Personas have become a mainstay in design research as a popular approach for representing different types of user needs (Salminen et al., 2020b), having been shown to strengthen user-centeredness in designers' decision-making (Heck et al., 2018), improve communication between designers (Grudin and Pruitt, 2002), and result in designs that better address usability requirements (Schneidewind et al., 2012). ...
... Personas in professional design practice are created primarily using qualitative, unstructured observations and expert verification. Creating an appropriate persona is also time-consuming, with costs averaging $49,000 in 2010 (a more recent estimate was not feasible due to the unavailability of relevant data; Drego and Dorsey, 2010;Salminen et al., 2020b). There are a variety of persona creation approaches, both qualitative (Cooper, 1999), such as role-based (e.g., Pruitt and Grudin, 2003), or fiction-based, (e.g., Blythe and Wright, 2006) and quantitative, such as k-means clustering, hierarchical clustering, principal component analysis, and latent semantic analysis (Jansen et al., 2020). ...
... Following the exercises, participants answered a NASA TLX usability survey (Hart and Staveland, 1988) and a modified Persona Perception Scale (PPS; Salminen et al., 2020b). The PPS was originally developed to evaluate individual impressions of various persona qualities, such as credibility, completeness, and consistency. ...
Article
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Personas are hypothetical representations of real-world people used as storytelling tools to help designers identify the goals, constraints, and scenarios of particular user groups. A well-constructed persona can provide enough detail to trigger recognition and empathy while leaving room for varying interpretations of users. While a traditional persona is a static representation of a potential user group, a chatbot representation of a persona is dynamic, in that it allows designers to “converse with” the representation. Such representations are further augmented by the use of large language models (LLMs), displaying more human-like characteristics such as emotions, priorities, and values. In this paper, we introduce the term “Synthetic User” to describe such representations of personas that are informed by traditional data and augmented by synthetic data. We study the effect of one example of such a Synthetic User – embodied as a chatbot – on the designers’ process, outcome, and their perception of the persona using a between-subjects study comparing it to a traditional persona summary. While designers showed comparable diversity in the ideas that emerged from both conditions, we find in the Synthetic User condition a greater variation in how designers perceive the persona’s attributes. We also find that the Synthetic User allows novel interactions such as seeking feedback and testing assumptions. We make suggestions for balancing consistency and variation in Synthetic User performance and propose guidelines for future development.
... This paper addresses these limitations by conducting a user study to compare how users perceive human-crafted and AI-generated personas based on factors from previous research, including their informativeness for design, believability, stereotypicality, positivity, relatability, consistency, clarity, and likability [38,40]. To this end, we surveyed participants to understand whether they can distinguish between human-crafted and AI-generated personas and which features in persona descriptions make them appear humane and credible. ...
... Then, we systematically created an AIgenerated persona dataset. We consulted ten HCI experts to craft a persona based on factors relevant to persona design from previous work [7,38,40]. Then, we strategically prompted OpenAI's GPT-4o to generate personas [38]. ...
... Personas aim to offer an explicit common ground for developers to empathize with their users' needs without involving them directly in the design process [41]. Personas are also used in numerous other areas, such as defining potential customer groups in online marketing or in developing patient-oriented health and care technologies [25,40]. Personas are traditionally created manually by experts in the field of HCI and user experience design. ...
Preprint
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Large Language Models (LLMs) created new opportunities for generating personas, which are expected to streamline and accelerate the human-centered design process. Yet, AI-generated personas may not accurately represent actual user experiences, as they can miss contextual and emotional insights critical to understanding real users' needs and behaviors. This paper examines the differences in how users perceive personas created by LLMs compared to those crafted by humans regarding their credibility for design. We gathered ten human-crafted personas developed by HCI experts according to relevant attributes established in related work. Then, we systematically generated ten personas and compared them with human-crafted ones in a survey. The results showed that participants differentiated between human-created and AI-generated personas, with the latter being perceived as more informative and consistent. However, participants noted that the AI-generated personas tended to follow stereotypes, highlighting the need for a greater emphasis on diversity when utilizing LLMs for persona creation.
... Personas typically include background information, goals, or behaviors, and are commonly used in product design, user experience research, and education [39,73,78]. Personas can help users focus their attention on a specific target audience, which can make users feel more empathy towards that group of people [64,78,87]. Additionally, in educational settings, personas have been used to foster inclusivity in education by recognizing students from historically underrepresented communities, like students with diverse abilities, and examining how the traits of various student groups interact to influence learning experiences [12,60]. ...
... Participants completed survey questions about their experience completing the main task. For each AI tutor, there were nine questions measuring perceived intelligence [67,68], perceived enjoyment [47,68], perceived usefulness [47,68], perceived trust [25,71], perceived sense of connection [43,84,86,87], and perceived human-likeness [43,84,86,87]. All questions were answered in a 7-point Likert scale. ...
... Participants completed survey questions about their experience completing the main task. For each AI tutor, there were nine questions measuring perceived intelligence [67,68], perceived enjoyment [47,68], perceived usefulness [47,68], perceived trust [25,71], perceived sense of connection [43,84,86,87], and perceived human-likeness [43,84,86,87]. All questions were answered in a 7-point Likert scale. ...
Preprint
Intelligent tutoring systems (ITS) using artificial intelligence (AI) technology have shown promise in supporting learners with diverse abilities; however, they often fail to meet the specific communication needs and cultural nuances needed by d/Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing (DHH) learners. As large language models (LLMs) provide new opportunities to incorporate personas to AI-based tutors and support dynamic interactive dialogue, this paper explores how DHH learners perceive LLM-powered ITS with different personas and identified design suggestions for improving the interaction. We developed an interface that allows DHH learners to interact with ChatGPT and three LLM-powered AI tutors with different experiences in DHH education while the learners watch an educational video. A user study with 16 DHH participants showed that they perceived conversations with the AI tutors who had DHH education experiences to be more human-like and trustworthy due to the tutors' cultural knowledge of DHH communities. Participants also suggested providing more transparency regarding the tutors' background information to clarify each AI tutor's position within the DHH community. We discuss design implications for more inclusive LLM-based systems, such as supports for the multimodality of sign language.
... For quantitative analysis, we use the existing persona perception scale [24] to how how the llms perceive the personas. The constructs or traits we study include Completeness, Clarity, Consistency and Credibility. ...
... For each of the constructs, we use the corresponding questions, as prescribed in [24]. Some these questions, in Table 1, are adapted for use for LLMs and for the 3 chosen personas from [11]. ...
... Table 1. The questions for each of the traits, borrowed from [24] In our approach to zero-shot prompt design, we adopt a similar strategy as Huang et al. [9]. Specifically, we instructed the llms to respond solely with a number corresponding to the levels of the Likert scale. ...
Preprint
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Large Language Models (LLMs), which have gained significant traction in recent years, also function as big structured repositories of data. User personas are a significant and widely utilized method in HCI. This study aims to investigate how LLMs, in their role as data repositories, interpret user personas. Our focus is specifically on personas within the Indian context, seeking to understand how LLMs would interpret such culturally specific personas. To achieve this, we conduct both quantitative and qualitative analyses. This multifaceted approach allows us a primary understanding of the interpretative capabilities of LLMs concerning personas within the Indian context.
... Porém, os estudos que propõem a automatização da criação de personas não investigam a qualidade das personas geradas em comparação às personas geradas de forma tradicional e os custos dos processos. Este artigo é uma extensão de Silva et al. (2021), artigo publicado no IV Workshop Sobre Aspectos Sociais, Humanos e Econômicos de Engenharia de Software e visa: (i) relatar a geração manual e semiautomática de personas de crianças autistas, (ii) descrever os insumos necessários para os processos e (iii) comparar a qualidade das personas criadas, segundo os critérios de completude, disposição de uso, clareza e empatia definidos por Salminen et al. (2020). Para a geração das personas foram utilizados dados reais de crianças autistas, obtidos de um survey conduzido por Sousa et al. (2019). ...
... A partir dos dados coletados foi aplicado Clusterização, utilizando o algoritmo k-means, através da ferramenta WEKA visando gerar as personas. Com o objetivo de avaliar a qualidade das personas geradas foi aplicado um novo questionário, criado com base no instrumento Persona Perception Scale (PPS) proposto por Salminen et al. (2020), levando em consideração os critérios de credibilidade, empatia e semelhança. A avaliação realizada mostrou que as personas geradas são válidas em relação aos critérios avaliados, sendo consideradas de boa qualidade. ...
... No estudo os autores utilizam a rede social Instagram para levantar dados de usuários com TEA, sendo os mesmos utilizados para criação de personas e requisitos dos usuários. As personas identificadas foram avaliadas por meio de dois métodos, sendo o primeiro um questionário baseado no instrumento Persona Perception Scale (PPS) proposto por Salminen et al. (2020) e o segundo um grupo focal. Os resultados obtidos no primeiro método indicaram que quatro personas apresentam alta qualidade e duas apresentam qualidade média. ...
Article
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Estudos vêm propondo a geração de personas de forma automática, porém, sem explorar possíveis diferenças na qualidade das personas geradas em relação a métodos manuais. Este artigo relata um estudo comparativo entre a geração semiautomática e manual de personas em relação à qualidade das personas obtidas, utilizando dados reais de crianças autistas. As personas obtidas foram avaliadas em relação à completude, disposição de uso, clareza e empatia. Os resultados indicam que as personas geradas de forma semiautomática apresentaram qualidade similar às personas geradas manualmente, porém a um custo menor. Com isso, espera-se fornecer indícios dos potenciais benefícios desta técnica para o desenvolvimento de software.
... The empirical results of how designers perceive personas in the context of IT development tasks could be surprising. On the one hand, personas are ideally perceived as "real people," and therefore, person perception (defined as how people perceive others (Salminen et al., 2020c)) may play a role in how the attractiveness of a user persona (or lack thereof) affects the designer's perceptions and decision making. This is the so-called human factor rationale, i.e. that decision-makers are fallible to certain biological or physical aspects of those they are designing for, and using user personas for the design of IT systems may aggravate this tendency. ...
... We address RQ1 using two questionnaires adapted for measuring designers' perceptions of user personas: the Persona Perception Scale (PPS) (Salminen et al., 2018c(Salminen et al., , 2020c and the Ten-Item Personality Inventory (TIPI) (Gosling et al., 2003). Using these instruments, we aim to determine whether the WIBIG effect applies to designers' persona perceptions (PPS: empathy, usefulness, credibility, completeness and likability); as well as the designers' perceptions of the user persona's personality traits (TIPI: agreeableness, openness, conscientiousness, emotional stability and extraversion), again, reflecting how the persona is perceived as a person. ...
... Using these instruments, we aim to determine whether the WIBIG effect applies to designers' persona perceptions (PPS: empathy, usefulness, credibility, completeness and likability); as well as the designers' perceptions of the user persona's personality traits (TIPI: agreeableness, openness, conscientiousness, emotional stability and extraversion), again, reflecting how the persona is perceived as a person. These perceptions are considered influential for persona use (Salminen et al., 2020c) and task outputs (Anvari et al., 2015(Anvari et al., , 2017, which we also investigate, focusing on dwell time as a proxy for user behavior (RQ2) and the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) (Pennebaker and King, 1999) as an indicator of task output qualities (RQ3). ...
Article
Purpose The “what is beautiful is good” (WIBIG) effect implies that observers tend to perceive physically attractive people in a positive light. The authors investigate how the WIBIG effect applies to user personas, measuring designers' perceptions and task performance when employing user personas for the design of information technology (IT) solutions. Design/methodology/approach In a user experiment, the authors tested six different personas with 235 participants that were asked to develop remote work solutions based on their interaction with a fictitious user persona. Findings The findings showed that a user persona's perceived attractiveness was positively correlated with other perceptions of the persona. The personas' completeness, credibility, empathy, likability and usefulness increased with attractiveness. More attractive personas were also perceived as more agreeable, emotionally stable, extraverted and open, and the participants spent more time engaging with personas they perceived attractive. A linguistic analysis indicated that the IT solutions created for more attractive user personas demonstrated a higher degree of affect, but for the most part, task outputs did not vary by the personas' perceived attractiveness. Research limitations/implications The WIBIG effect applies when designing IT solutions with user personas, but its effect on task outputs appears limited. The perceived attractiveness of a user persona can impact how designers interact with and engage with the persona, which can influence the quality or the type of the IT solutions created based on the persona. Also, the findings point to the need to incorporate hedonic qualities into the persona creation process. For example, there may be contexts where it is helpful that the personas be attractive; there may be contexts where the attractiveness of the personas is unimportant or even a distraction. Practical implications The findings point to the need to incorporate hedonic qualities into the persona creation process. For example, there may be contexts where it is helpful that the personas be attractive; there may be contexts where the attractiveness of the personas is unimportant or even a distraction. Originality/value Because personas are created to closely resemble real people, the authors might expect the WIBIG effect to apply. The WIBIG effect might lead decision makers to favor more attractive personas when designing IT solutions. However, despite its potential relevance for decision making with personas, as far as the authors know, no prior study has investigated whether the WIBIG effect extends to the context of personas. Overall, it is important to understand how human factors apply to IT system design with personas, so that the personas can be created to minimize potentially detrimental effects as much as possible.
... Clarity (P1) is about clear and precise information provided. It is also about how a piece of information is presented [39]. For supplier evaluation, it is about how a supply provides relevant information to the company and how importance the clarity of this information is to any decision maker in the company. ...
... Completeness (P2) is referring to the user having all significant information for its business. The information given is detailed enough to make a decision [39]. ...
... Consistency (P3) is the quality of always responding, providing or performing in a similar way. The information provided also needs to match other information [39]. ...
Article
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Sustainability, a new interdisciplinary paradigm, can be defined as a standard in terms of economic, environmental and social awareness of a company. In many applications, theoretical sustainability models considering the importance of three aspects equally differed from models used in practice. A sustainable supplier selection problem generally contains many conflicting information and the imprecise decision makers’ knowledge, and decision makers can judge suppliers based on their first impression. Hence, in this study, a sustainable supplier selection problem of a plastic packaging company in Turkey is taken into account under an expert-based model and a theorical-based model for three scenarios which consider personal perceptions of decision makers. First, an intuitionistic fuzzy set-based method is applied to the problem using two different distance measurement approaches, namely, fuzzy normalized Euclidean distance and the Taguchi loss function, for which an alternative method is proposed. Then, suppliers are ranked and the validity of the results is also checked using the Pearson product–moment correlation coefficient. The results indicate that (i) the personal perception of decision makers has an inevitable impact on results, (ii) the proposed approach can capture the associated uncertainties embedded in decision makers and fuzzy environment, and (iii) there is a disparity between the theory and the reality of sustainability.
... Contudo, um dos desafios em relação à adoção e uso de personas é a dificuldade em avaliar sua acurácia e utilidade para cenários reais. Para contribuir com a avaliação de personas, Salminen et al. (2020) propuseram um instrumento denominado Personas Perception Scale (PPS) que considera fatores relevantes sobre a percepção de personas: consistência, completude, disposição de uso, credibilidade, clareza, similaridade, simpatia e empatia. Os fatores são avaliados por meio de uma escala de concordância. ...
... Os fatores são avaliados por meio de uma escala de concordância. Salminen et al. (2020) argumentam que os pesquisadores podem selecionar os fatores de seu interesse para adaptar o instrumento a ser adotado em suas avaliações de personas. ...
... De forma similar à Branco (2020) e Silva et al. (2021), esta pesquisa adaptou o instrumento PPS, proposto por Salminen et al. (2020) para avaliar as personas criadas com base nos dados obtidos da netnografia. Complementarmente, com o intuito de explorar a utilidade das personas e possíveis sugestões de melhorias, um grupo focal com integrantes do ProDTeA foi conduzido. ...
Article
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Netnografia é uma etnografia realizada online, que tem um custo reduzido quando comparada à etnografia convencional e possibilita o alcance de um público-alvo disperso, como é o caso das pessoas com Transtorno do Espectro Autista (TEA). Este artigo relata a criação de personas e requisitos de usuário com base em dados obtidos em uma netnografia conduzida na rede social Instagram. Para avaliar a qualidade das personas criadas, duas estratégias foram adotadas: (i) aplicação de questionário com profissionais da área de desenvolvimento de software para avaliar o nível de completude, disposição de uso, clareza e empatia das personas; e (ii) realização de grupo focal com integrantes de um projeto de pesquisa sobre TEA para explorar a utilidade das personas para a concepção de produtos para pessoas autistas. Como resultado desta análise, quatro das seis personas criadas foram avaliadas como de ótima qualidade, as outras duas alcançaram qualidade média.
... Overall, we can consider the five perceptions that the hypotheses address as positive impressions about personas (Salminen et al., 2020d). According to this idea, empirically derived persona perceptions can help designers design "good" (as in desirable and socially acceptable) personas. ...
... To measure the perceptions in our hypotheses, we used the persona perception scale (PPS), an instrument designed to gauge the multiple ways in which users perceive personas (Salminen et al., 2020d). Researchers have previously deployed the PPS in similar persona experiments, such as to test the effect that smiling images (Salminen et al., 2019d) and explanations in DDPs (Salminen, Santos, Jung, Eslami, & Jansen, 2019e) have on user perceptions. ...
... Researchers have previously deployed the PPS in similar persona experiments, such as to test the effect that smiling images (Salminen et al., 2019d) and explanations in DDPs (Salminen, Santos, Jung, Eslami, & Jansen, 2019e) have on user perceptions. Salminen et al. (2020d) validated the PPS, although we also conducted a separate validation analysis here (see Section 4.4). We measured four persona perceptions from the PPS with 16 items in total (see Table 2). ...
Article
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When algorithms create personas from social media data, the personas can become noxious via automatically including toxic comments. To investigate how users perceive such personas, we conducted a 2 × 2 user experiment with 496 participants that showed participants toxic and non-toxic versions of data-driven personas. We found that participants gave higher credibility, likability, empathy, similarity, and willingness-to-use scores to non-toxic personas. Also, gender affected toxicity perceptions in that female toxic data-driven personas scored lower in likability, empathy, and similarity than their male counterparts. Female participants gave higher perceptions scores to non-toxic personas and lower scores to toxic personas than male participants. We discuss implications from our research for designing data-driven personas.
... Our persona modeling approach integrates studies on the concept of explainability requirement [6], people's perception of the explainability requirement [7], creation of empathy maps and personas [8,9], and evaluation of personas through the Persona Perception Scale [10]. It is a five-step process that can be summarized as follows: 1) questionnaires are applied to users to collect their perceptions and needs; 2) the responses obtained are used to create empathy maps including what the user says, feels, does and thinks about explainability; 3) similar empathy maps from different users are aggregated; 4) from the groups of empathy maps the personas are generated; 5) the personas are validated with the target public of users and designers. ...
... The obtained results include a set of 5 distinct personas. Considering attributes of the Persona Perception Scale method [10], we found that personas are rated by the users as representative of them at an average level of 3.7 out of 5 and are rated by designers as having quality 3.5 out of 5. The median rate is 4 out of 5 in the majority of evaluation criteria. ...
... Although personas are widely used in many domains, its evaluation is difficult, mainly due to the lack of validated measuring instruments. With this, the authors prepare a survey to assess the perception of individuals about a persona [10]. This artifact consists of 8 evaluation criteria, which can be modified to meet only those relevant to the research, each containing a maximum of 4 statements on a Likert scale: ...
Chapter
This work focuses on the context of software explainability, which is the production of software capable of explaining to users the dynamics that govern its internal functioning. User models that include information about their requirements and their perceptions of explainability are fundamental when building software with such capability. This study investigates the process of creating personas that include information about users’ explainability perceptions and needs. The proposed approach is based on data collection with questionnaires, modeling of empathy maps, grouping the maps, generating personas from them and evaluation employing the Persona Perception Scale method. In an empirical study, personas are created from 61 users’ response data to a questionnaire. The generated personas are evaluated by 60 users and 38 designers considering attributes of the Persona Perception Scale method. The results include a set of 5 distinct personas that users rate as representative of them at an average level of 3.7 out of 5, and designers rate as having quality 3.5 out of 5. The median rate is 4 out of 5 in the majority of criteria judged by users and designers. Both the personas and their creation and evaluation approach are contributions of this study to the design of software that satisfies the explainability requirement.
... Nonetheless, this latter, persona accessibility aspect, matters. The research gap we address, therefore, lies in understanding how age, gender, and experience with user representation interfaces-specifically two interactive persona types of web-based profiles and chat personas-affect user perceptions of personas [25,28], such as perceived credibility, consistency, similarity, stereotypicality, and empathy of interactive personas (for this testing, we use two validated HCI scales; see Section 3). Overall, there is a need to meet the diverse requirements of varied user groups to support personas' effectiveness as a design tool across a broad spectrum of users [4]. ...
... After interacting with a persona and completing the task, the participant would answer survey questions about the persona (see the online supplementary material). These questions originated from two validated scales: the System Usability Scale (SUS) [18] and the Persona Perception Scale (PPS) [28]. After completing the task with both personas, the participant was thanked and given a gift card as thanks for their time. ...
Conference Paper
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We investigate the impact of user demographics (age, gender) and experience (with personas and chatbots) on users’ perceptions of interactive personas. A within-subjects study was conducted with 54 participants, mostly engineers and computer scientists. Each participant used interactive personas with two interfaces: a web-based profile persona and a chat persona. The findings from regression analysis indicate that users’ age and gender (as well as persona’s gender) affect multiple perceptions of personas. In addition, the interface modality (profile vs. chat) has a significant impact. Findings highlight the need for designing interactive personas that appeal to diverse user bases to increase the general accessibility of interactive personas. They also support the notion that the persona interface itself regulates user perceptions even when the persona’s information remains the same.
... A scarcity of pertinent research is latent, since most academics have disregarded CR; despite evidence suggesting otherwise, the clinicians gave little consideration to the function of innovativeness in reading (Salminen et al., 2020). The tenor of reading that commands the maximal capitalization of one's imagination is the least stressed, as stated by Brevik and colleagues (2018). ...
... Pupils who have mastered both conscious and critical reading puissance are expected to resort to those dexterities, in order to polish original reading accouterments. We may claim that CR is the peak of reading caliber, forasmuch as it insists on a greater level of refinement than profound reading (Salminen et al., 2020). ...
Article
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The headline of this research is on how schoolchild readers’ mental frameworks alter their understanding of what constitutes creative reading. In the paper at hand, 320 Greek fourth graders participated in a correlational survey project, wherein both basic and multiple linear regression, as well as Pearson’s r product–moment correlation, were exerted to ponder the annals assembled. The procured results, among others, indicated a senior, reversed match allying the sub-dimensions of the dispensed “attitude toward reading and perception of creative reading (ATR–PCR)” scale; to put it modestly, as a student’s position near reading improves, the importance they assign on their ability to steer their imagination while reading decreases. Besides that, strong shared links dealing with the perception of inventive reading and the sub-facets of contributions, meaning, activities, and the plenary praxis of reading, plus the fact that temperament in view of reading was a covariate of the mindfulness of ingenious reading, were identified.
... RQ1 matters because, as representations of human beings, the way users perceive personas is critical for their application (Grudin, 2006, pp. 642-663;Salminen et al., 2020f) and in making personas 'work' in practical settings (Friess, 2012;Grudin, 2006, pp. 642-663;Matthews, Judge, & Whittaker, 2012;Nielsen & Hansen, 2014). ...
... In preparation of the analysis, which required the usage of a multilevel model to account for within-participant variability (as each participant received three different stimuli, i.e., personas), the data was transported from the wide into the long format, so that each "case" represented a participant-persona dyad. We employed the Persona Perception Scale (PPS) (Salminen et al., 2020f). To establish repeated scale validity, we conducted through Confirmatory Factor Analysis to determine the validity and reliability of the instrument. ...
Article
HCI research is facing a vital question of the effectiveness of AI-generated personas. Addressing this question, this research explores user perceptions of AI-generated personas for textual content (GPT-4) and two image generation models (DALL-E and Midjourney). We evaluate whether the inclusion of images in AI-generated personas impacts user perception or if AI text descriptions alone suffice to create good personas. Recruiting 216 participants, we compare three GPT-generated personas without images and those with either DALL-E or Midjourney-created images. Contrary to initial expectations from persona literature, the presence of images in AI-generated personas did not significantly impact user perceptions. Rather, the participants generally perceived AI-generated personas to be of good quality regardless of the inclusion of images. These findings suggest that textual content, i.e., the persona narrative, is the primary driver of user perceptions in AI-generated personas. Our findings contribute to the ongoing AI-HCI discourse and provide recommendations for designing AI-generated personas.
... The persona-self created by consumers helps heighten consumer immersion (Mori et al., 2019), engaging in communication and use of the persona-self as perceptual models to persistently sustain consumers' minds . As consumers show emotional links to human-like interfaces (Araujo, 2018), the humanization of systems appears in the case of personas (Salminen et al., 2020). The employment of personas assists in heightened immersion (Mori et al., 2019) and interaction with virtual agents (Hasler et al., 2013), robots (Tay et al., 2014), chatbots (Banks, 2019) and Metaverse characters. ...
... The examination of Metaverse user studies establishes that consumers' persona selves are likely to develop a strong attachment to a luxury brand that ensures that they assist in expanding their actual selves in the Metaverse. In previous research, persona, the human-like representation of user information that is likely to be considered as a person by others (Turner and Turner, 2011), has been studied in terms of emotional links to human-like interfaces (Araujo, 2018) and the humanization of systems (Salminen et al., 2020). In prior studies, by sense-making that arises from the figures selected by persona creators and endusers' experiences (Nielsen et al., 2017), personas work for heightened immersion (Mori et al., 2019) and interaction with virtual agents (Hasler et al., 2013), robots (Tay et al., 2014) and chatbots (Banks, 2019). ...
Article
Purpose This study aims to examine the effect of actual and persona self-congruence on luxury brand attachment and the effects of luxury brand attachment on attitude toward luxury brands and purchase intentions using empirical data on Metaverse users. Design/methodology/approach The authors recruited 300 Metaverse users from South Korea to participate in the survey. Participants were asked whether the participants had experienced Metaverse, including Roblox and Zepeto, before participating in the survey. The Gucci Garden was suggested as a luxury brand in the Metaverse for the participants. Findings The findings clarify the concept of persona self-congruence and support the congruence's effects on luxury brand attachment in the Metaverse context. This study found a positive relationship between persona self-congruence and luxury brand attachment that influences attitude and purchase intentions in the context of Metaverse, contributing to the theoretical and practical implications for luxury brand management. Research limitations/implications This study contributes to luxury brand marketing in the Metaverse context by clarifying the concept of persona self-congruence and articulating the congruence's effects on luxury brand attachment in the context of the Metaverse. Practical implications In the post-pandemic world, this study offers luxury brand practitioners new insights to help the practitioners develop and manage luxury brand strategies by understanding the influence of persona self-congruence and luxury brand attachment on luxury brand evaluation in the Metaverse context. Originality/value This study addresses an innovative and practical issue related to the impact of persona self-congruence on luxury brand attachment in the Metaverse, offering new insights for luxury brand management in the post-pandemic world.
... Persona is a method that can communicate individual dimensions in a system, software, or product design [5]. The benefits of personas are confirmed by researchers in the field of human-computer interaction (HCI) [6][7][8][9]. As a method in user experience [10][11][12], personas help understand the point of view of users. ...
... Persona profiles depicted as real people usually provide information about demographics, motivations, frustrations, and information specific to domains, for example, interest preferences [6]. Demographics are statistical data relating to specific populations or groups [17]. ...
Article
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Persona is a method to create a user profile by describing a fictitious user through user experience. This persona study needs to be carried out for the benefit of system design according to the users’ wishes because, so far, electronic resources (e-resources) are not widely used due to cognitive and affective factors such as limited subscription resources, limited user manuals, limited navigation features, and frequent errors when using electronic resources. This leaves the user feeling confused and stressed. The aim of this study is to obtain profiles of e-resource users in college libraries. The method used is an empathy map created with data from 32 users who answered questionnaires and participated in interviews. This study found four e-resource user personas in university libraries: lecturers, students, research assistants, and librarians. Users want a guide for using electronic resources that allows for chat and sharing, and which is fun and can be accessed from any device anytime and anywhere. The benefits of this study will be useful for designing e-resource systems according to users’ wishes.
... For example, usefulness was measured by asking, "In your opinion, how useful is the toxicity filtering feature?" These constructs and items correspond to those deployed in previous quantitative persona user studies (e.g., [69,72,73]). ...
... To recruit participants, we used Prolific, an online survey and study platform that has been deployed in previous research, including persona user studies [69,70,72,73]. The following sampling criteria were applied to find people working in online content creation or related fields: Age = 23-65 (as we wanted people active in work-life), Industry = Publishing (this was the conceptually closest category available in Prolific), and Student status = No (as we wanted people active in work-life). ...
Conference Paper
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Algorithmically generated personas can help organizations understand their social media audiences. However, when using algorithms to create personas from social media user data, the resulting personas may contain toxic quotes that negatively affect content creators’ perceptions of the personas. To address this issue, we have implemented toxicity detection in an algorithmic persona generation system capable of using tens of millions of social media interactions and user comments for persona creation. On the system's user interface, we provide a feature for content creators using the personas to turn on or off toxic quotes, depending on their preferences. To investigate the feasibility of this feature, we conducted a study with 50 professionals in the online publishing domain. The results show varied reactions, including hate-filter critics, hate-filter advocates, and those in between. Although personal preferences play a role, the usefulness of toxicity filtering appears primarily driven by the work task – specifically the type and topic of stories the content creator seeks to create. We identify six use cases where a toxicity filter is beneficial. For system development, the results imply that it is beneficial to give content creators the option to view or not view toxic comments, rather than making this decision in their stead. We also discuss the ethical implications of removing toxic quotes in algorithmically generated personas, including potentially biasing the user representation.
... The adoption and active use of personas are hindered by factors such as perceived lack of credibility, accuracy, or usefulness [35,42,70,89,92]. While prior research has focused on persona perceptions [100] as the explanation for why personas fail, the importance of organizational factors concerning successful persona implementation is often overlooked. Yet, organizational factors tend to play a central role in creating better information systems and products [12,12,21,59]. ...
... For both samples, a carefully selected number of participants from the online survey platform Prolific was recruited. Prolific has been used in several persona user studies in the past [94,96,99,100], and its data quality has been found satisfactory for academic research [82,83]. We applied custom prescreening to increase the validity of the responses with the following sampling criteria: ...
Article
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User-centric design within organizations is crucial for developing information technology that offers optimal usability and user experience. Personas are a central user-centered design technique that puts people before technology and helps decision makers understand the needs and wants of the end-user segments of their products, systems, and services. However, it is not clear how ready organizations are to adopt persona thinking. To address these concerns, we develop and validate the Persona Readiness Scale (PRS), a survey instrument to measure organizational readiness for personas. After a 12-person qualitative pilot study, the PRS was administered to 372 professionals across different industries to examine its reliability and validity, including 125 for exploratory factor analysis and 247 for confirmatory factor analysis. The confirmatory factor analysis indicated a good fit with five dimensions: Culture readiness, Knowledge readiness, Data and systems readiness, Capability readiness, and Goal readiness. Higher persona readiness is positively associated with the respondents’ evaluations of successful persona projects. Organizations can apply the resulting 18-item scale to identify areas of improvement before initiating costly persona projects towards the overarching goal of user-centric product development. Located at the cross-section of information systems and human–computer interaction, our research provides a valuable instrument for organizations wanting to leverage personas towards more user-centric and empathetic decision making about users.
... Researchers deploy research with a different participant pool to strengthen clarity, increase transparency, remove ambiguous phrases, and decrease researcher bias from the instrument prior to data collection (Salminen et al., 2020). The researcher should ensure that the survey does not have an effect of formulation that might distort participants' responses. ...
Research
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This study examined the relationship between employee-driven corporate social responsibility (CSR) factors and employee innovation in U.S. medical diagnostic companies during the respiratory syndrome coronavirus (COVID) pandemic. This study examined what employee driven CSR factors affect such motivation of employees toward innovation. The research population was employees who have worked in operation, quality control, research, technical, and management departments of medical diagnostics companies in the United States of America. The investigator used a survey questionnaire for this correlation design study. Employees’ responses were analyzed based on education level, gender, and job function using descriptive analysis, t-test, and ANOVA-test. The theoretical framework consisted of the theory of corporate social responsibility and the expectancy theory of motivation. The study questions focused on nine predictors of employee-driven CSR, including employees’ rewards and recognition, empowerment, resources, engagement, and decision-making involvement, horizontal communication, vertical communication, employee job satisfaction, employee training, and leadership relationships as dependent variables and their impact on employee innovation climate as independent variables. Correlation and multiple regressions were conducted to determine the underlying relationship of the variables. The result indicated a significant relationship between employee-driven CSR and employee innovation. In addition, the study revealed that nine employee-driven CSR factors explained about 50% of the employee innovation as predictor variables. Job satisfaction had the most significant impact on employee innovation climate, followed by Horizontal communication. In conclusion, this study recognized job satisfaction as the most critical employee motivational factor to innovate through quantitative research, which was also a characteristic of employee-driven CSR. The value of employee-driven CSR factors’ influence on innovation can contribute to both theory and practice. This research may highlight how medical diagnostics business leaders foster innovation through employee-driven CSR.
... Studies for creating and identifying personas largely involve qualitative methods such as interviews, field studies, and surveys (Brickey et al., 2012;Salminen et al., 2020). In particular, surveys in the form of questionnaires have widely been adopted in psychology and behavioral studies to measure personality traits and opinions of individuals in a standardized manner at a large scale (Spence et al., 1974;Dalbert, 1999;Patrick et al., 2002;Van Der Zee and Van Oudenhoven, 2000). ...
... When describing user roles, we mainly focus on basic information, behavioral models, psychological motivations, usage scenarios, user pain points, etc. The user role model helps designers understand the diverse needs of users more deeply and provides design guidance for telemedicine interface designers for the elderly [11], as shown in Figure 1. Dismantle the main stages and key behaviors of users using telemedicine services, analyze user touch points, emotional curves, user needs, and design opportunities, and construct a user experience journey map of telemedicine for the elderly, as shown in Figure 2. ...
Article
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The rapid development of population aging has brought many problems to human society, and the health of the elderly has become a focus of social concern. As an important tool to support the health of the elderly, telemedicine service systems are significance to the realization of active aging. This study aims to explore a telemedicine service system for the elderly that adapts to the needs of active aging, to solve the obstacles that the elderly encounter when accessing medical services, and to provide more convenient, efficient and personalized medical services for the elderly. A mixed research method was used, including a literature review, questionnaires and qualitative interviews. First, a literature review is conducted to understand the concept of active aging and the current status of telemedicine services. Secondly, the opinions, expectations and needs of the elderly and their families on telemedicine services were collected through qualitative interviews and questionnaires. Thirdly, based on the collected information, integrate user behavior data, build a user experience journey map and user role model, and propose design opportunities. Finally, taking into account the physiological, psychological and social needs of the elderly, a telemedicine service system for the elderly was designed, and user testing and feedback were conducted to verify the feasibility and effectiveness of the system. The study found that the elderly have a high acceptance of telemedicine services and can meet their basic medical needs, but they also have concerns about technology use, privacy protection and service quality.
... We also encourage follow-up research utilizing thematic analysis in conjunction with large language modeling for persona development, particularly with qualitative interview data, which has displayed promise [66] and should be monitored. We further encourage research to add to the credibility of creating personas by evaluating how individuals perceive personas with the Persona Perception Scale (PPS) [67]. Using the PPS can help those who develop personas understand how they are perceived, improving their chances of being useful for their intended purpose. ...
Article
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The success of innovations hinges on the relevant stakeholders' perceptions. While the success of some innovations—for example, those related to consumer products—often depends on only one stakeholder, the buyer, the success of other innovations, such as renewable energy sources, depends on multiple stakeholders. The traditional trend of focusing on only one stakeholder, the buyer, bears the risk of failing innovation adoption simply because it ignores other relevant stakeholders. We show the potential value of personas for the adoption and acceptance by multiple stakeholders of innovations related to renewable energy. We introduce personas as a qualitative research method because they offer clear and memorable access to relevant stakeholders' needs, goals, and frustrations regarding an innovation. We provide a valuable blueprint of a persona development process based on an acknowledged qualitative research method–thematic analysis. We also offer guidelines on developing personas and showcase how rigorous qualitative research can address existing critiques of persona development methods. Our study includes a case example of persona development based on 27 semi-structured interviews with different stakeholders of our case of agrivoltaics. Agrivoltaics is a dual land-use approach in which crop and energy production are combined in a complementary beneficial relationship. Based on this case, we demonstrate how personas offer a valuable qualitative research method to achieve better innovation development and adoption based on the perceptions of critical stakeholders toward innovations in society.
... The process of constructing and sustaining online personas is complex, influenced by various factors (Mihailidis, 2020;Salminen et al., 2020). Virtual communities, unlike real-life environments, lack concrete controls, making them appealing spaces for individuals to express conventional and unconventional behaviors, manifesting imagined identities, and cultivating stronger virtual relationships (Chapman et al., 2021). ...
Article
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Virtual communication through social networking sites: Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, Snapchat, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Gaming Sites, and YouTube is the key characteristic of contemporary lifestyles, relationships, and interactions of young adults with friends and family (Bhowmick & Madhu,2020). Its spread has raised concerns in Pakistan, a multi-lingual and multi-ethnic Muslim country, with conventional, family-orientated social frameworks based mostly on joint and extended systems. Online over-engagement though is increasing awareness, it is reducing real communication between parents and their (young) adults in urban Pakistan that the society considers essential for propagation of family norms, traditions, and values (Woodward, 2020). It has compromised real family time and inter-family social networking by involving individuals in the virtual world. They are physically present with their families but they are mentally engaged with their mobile phones (Kanwal, Pitafi, Akhtar, and Irfan, 2019). This research explores the multifaceted impact of virtual engagement with social networking sites on patterns of open communication within families. The study aims to investigate the influence of virtual engagement on real-life priorities and connections, proposing hypotheses that posit significant correlations between online identity maintenance and decreases in family social interaction and bonding. Utilizing a quantitative approach, the research employs a survey method with standardized questions to collect data from 800 participants. The data is analyzed using the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) version 26, revealing key demographic information and social media usage patterns. Linear regression analyses support the hypotheses, demonstrating a significant relationship between time spent on social media and reduced family interaction and bonding, as well as its impact on family relations and priorities. The findings suggest that excessive engagement in sustaining online identities negatively influences real-life relationships, emphasizing the need to address the growing trend of social media dependency in familial contexts. The findings serve as a guide for the strategists who may plan to sustain social values and good relations between parents and their (young) adults in what they are perceiving as digital Pakistan of the future.
... This would enable arguing for novelty and value of contribution from multiple sides. An example of validating stakeholder feedback on personas is the Persona Perception Scale [68], an instrument that measures several impressions, including the persona's perceived credibility, consistency, clarity, and completeness. Human assessment is also vital for rating the quality of NLP outputs [19]. ...
Conference Paper
Human-computer interaction (HCI) and natural language processing (NLP) can engage in mutually beneficial collaboration. This article summarizes previous literature to identify grand challenges for the application of NLP in quantitative user personas (QUPs), which exemplifies such collaboration. Grand challenges provide a collaborative starting point for researchers working at the intersection of NLP and QUPs, towards improved user experiences. NLP research could also benefit from focusing on generating user personas by introducing new solutions to specific NLP tasks, such as classification and generation. We also discuss the novel opportunities introduced by Generative AI to address the grand challenges, offering illustrative examples.
... • For example, designing the survey instrument involves developing the survey questions, response options, item construct (Salminen et al., 2020), and any other necessary components of the survey instrument -LLMs could help phrase the questions and pinpoint any inconsistencies, and perhaps suggest the best response options to measure respondents' opinions. • Sampling means selecting a representative sample of individuals from the target population, which can vary depending on the research question and resources available -LLMs could suggest appropriate samples and techniques for recruiting participants. ...
Article
This article discusses the promising potential of employing large language models (LLMs) for survey research, including generating responses to survey items. LLMs can address some of the challenges associated with survey research regarding question-wording and response bias. They can address issues relating to a lack of clarity and understanding but cannot yet correct for sampling or nonresponse bias challenges. While LLMs can assist with some of the challenges with survey research, at present, LLMs need to be used in conjunction with other methods and approaches. With thoughtful and nuanced approaches to development, LLMs can be used responsibly and beneficially while minimizing the associated risks.
... Persona studies have addressed clarity from two different directions. Firstly, a persona profile's clarity (such as pictures and text) may influence the perceptions of the end-user (Salminen et al., 2020e). Secondly, the information in the persona profile can sometimes be unclear, which confuses the end user (Salminen et al., 2019a). ...
Article
Deepfakes, realistic portrayals of people that do not exist, have garnered interest in research and industry. Yet, the contributions of deepfake technology to human-computer interaction remain unclear. One possible value of deepfake technology is to create more immersive user personas. To test this premise, we use a commercial-grade service to generate three deepfake personas (DFs). We also create counterparts of the same persona in two traditional modalities: classic and narrative personas. We then investigate how persona modality affects the perceptions and task performance of the persona user. Our findings show that the DFs were perceived as less empathetic, credible, complete, clear, and immersive than other modalities. Participants also indicated less willingness to use the DFs and less sense of control, but there were no differences in task performance. We also found a strong correlation between the uncanny valley effect and other user perceptions, implying that the tested deepfake technology might lack maturity for personas, negatively affecting user experience. Designers might also be accustomed to using traditional persona profiles. Further research is needed to investigate the potential and downsides of DFs.
... The agency gathered usable data from 454 Koreans (Table 3) who had used the NS. All responses were collected employing a seven-point Likert scale (Chen et al., 2021;Lee, Nah, Chung & Kim, 2020;Salminen et al., 2020;Seong & Hong, 2021). The sample size also meets the requirement of the 1:10 ratio between the number of variables (or independent variables) and that of the participants, as suggested by prior studies related to ANN-SEM analysis (Bentler & Chou, 1987;Chong, 2013a;Kalinić et al., 2021;). ...
Article
Our research attempts to track the role of coolness factors (i.e., attractiveness, subculture, and uniqueness) on user satisfaction and loyalty with respect to technological products. For this purpose , we construct a model for a particular technological product on the basis of coolness and satisfaction-loyalty theories. We then gather survey-based data from 454 Koreans for measuring the coolness factors, satisfaction, and loyalty variables. Subsequently, we employ an artificial neural network-structural equation model for testing the proposed model. Based on the outcomes , (1) we find that attractiveness and uniqueness have notable and positive effects on satisfaction, (2) whereas, subculture does not have a considerable impact on satisfaction. (3) In addition, a positive association between satisfaction and loyalty is identified. (4) Interestingly, there are no significant moderating influences of age and gender on the associations of coolness elements. Overall, the outcomes of our research contribute to the expansion of the literature regarding coolness theory and user experience of technologies.
... Finally, evaluation of personas and customer segments is generally considered an on-going research area with room for contribution [15,63]. While we propose metrics to quantify "good personas" according to certain design goals, more quantitative metrics for persona evaluation could be devised, which remains an important goal for future research. ...
Article
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Derived from the notion of algorithmic bias, it is possible that creating user segments such as personas from data results in over- or under-representing certain segments (FAIRNESS), does not properly represent the diversity of the user populations (DIVERSITY), or produces inconsistent results when hyperparameters are changed (CONSISTENCY). Collecting user data on 363M video views from a global news and media organization, we compare personas created from this data using different algorithms. Results indicate that the algorithms fall into two groups: those that generate personas with low diversity–high fairness and those that generate personas with high diversity–low fairness. The algorithms that rank high on diversity tend to rank low on fairness (Spearman's correlation: −0.83). The algorithm that best balances diversity, fairness, and consistency is Spectral Embedding. The results imply that 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. The results have implications for algorithmic bias in user segmentation and creating user segments that not only consider commercial segmentation criteria but also consider criteria derived from ethical discussions in the computing community.
... The 3-factor solution deviated from the structure retrieved from the literature review. Items 1, 6, and 8 showed moderate cross-loadings into other factors (..30; Salminen et al., 2020). It was opted not to remove these items and reevaluate them in the CFA stage. ...
Article
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Persuasión del psicoterapeuta en la ansiedad: desarrollo de la escala y relación con la alianza de trabajo Comunicar un razonamiento pesuasivo que explique los problemas del cliente y cómo psicoterapia puede aliviarlos se ha propuesto como un determinante crucial de los resultados que combate el estado de angustia del cliente, promueve expectativas positivas y facilita la alianza de trabajo. Sin embargo, sigue siendo una de las habilidades interpersonales facilitadoras de psicoterapeutas menos investigados y sin una medida validada. El presente estudio observacional correlacional tuvo como objetivo desarrollar una escala de calificación que mide la capacidad de persuasión del psicoterapeuta, y para examinar su relación con la alianza de trabajo. Basado en una revisión de la literatura de la capacidad de persuasión del psicoterapeuta, la Escala de Calificación de Persuasión del Terapeuta (TPRS) fue construido. Se utilizaron 17 grabaciones de sesiones de pscioterapia para validar la escala mediante análisis factorial exploratorio y confirmatorio, y evaluación de validez, confiabilidad y sensibilidad. Catorce grabaciones de sesiones de psicoterapia con clientes que sufren de ansiedad fueron calificados usando el TPRS y el Inventario de la Alianza de Trabajo-Versión del Observador-Forma Corta (WAI-O-S) para examinar la relación entre las dos variables. El proceso de validación resultó en una escala de 10 ítems de 4 factores. Excepto por la validez discriminante, que fue revelada inadecuada, la TPRS demostró ser una medida válida, confiable y sensible de la capacidad de persuasión del psicoterapeuta. A pesar de una correlación no significativa encontrada en el modelo de correlación Spearman, un modelo de regresión lineal sugirió que la capacidad de persuasión del psicoterapeuta explica el 65,1% de la alianza de trabajo al inicio de la sesión. El TPRS reveló una medida prometedora con buenas cualidades psicométricas para avanzar en la investigación sobre la capacidad de persuasión del psicoterapeuta. Hay alguna sugerencia del efecto de persuasión del psicoterapeuta en la alianza de trabajo, pero el resultado no tuvo significación estadística.
Chapter
Quantum Artificial Intelligence offers a new avenue in enhancing customer personas through the combination of quantum computing and AI to process large files in parallel computing. This chapter describes how QAI enables real-time updates of customer profiles in real synchrony with dynamic behaviors, preferences, and practices. Quantum machine learning enhances both sentiment analysis and predictive modeling with the help of natural language processing, which enables high personalized experiences for businesses. QAI's ability to analyse large volumes of data improves the strategies of marketing through better customer segmentation, improvement in the areas of recommendation engines, and accurate predictions about consumer behavior. This chapter showcases the transformative potential of QAI in empowering the task of real-time personalized data-driven marketing and providing better relations with customers that drives the new age businesses. Integration of QAI in persona development will help companies achieve higher customer satisfaction and loyalty in the evolving digital marketplace.
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Background Internet-delivered cognitive behavioral therapy (ICBT) is an effective and convenient means of offering cognitive behavioral therapy to the general population. To increase access to ICBT among Canadian public safety personnel (PSP)—a group that experiences elevated rates of mental health concerns and barriers to mental health care—a clinical research unit called PSPNET has tailored ICBT to PSP, primarily through offering case stories and PSP-specific examples within an ICBT program. PSPNET’s first and most frequently used ICBT program, called the PSP Wellbeing Course, has been found to reduce symptoms of mental disorders (eg, anxiety, depression, and posttraumatic stress) among PSP. Little research, however, has investigated clients’ perceptions of the case stories in this course. Objective This study was designed to expand the literature on the use and evaluation of case stories in ICBT among PSP. Specifically, this study investigated (1) PSP’s perceptions of the case stories using the theoretical model provided by Shaffer and Zikmund-Fisher and (2) PSP feedback on the case stories in the PSP Wellbeing Course. Methods This study included 41 clients who completed the PSP Wellbeing Course. Of these, 27 clients completed a bespoke questionnaire called the Stories Questionnaire, 10 of whom also participated in a semistructured interview. Results Findings show that perceptions of the case stories in the PSP Wellbeing Course were largely positive and that the case stories were generally successful in achieving the 5 purposes of case stories (ie, informing, comforting, modeling, engaging, and persuading) proposed by Shaffer and Zikmund-Fisher. Client feedback also identified 3 tangible areas for story improvement: characters, content, and delivery. Each area highlights the need for and potential benefits of story development. Not all PSP engaged with the case stories, though, so results must be interpreted with caution. Conclusions Overall, this study adds to the growing body of research supporting the use of case stories in internet-delivered interventions among PSP. Trial Registration ClinicalTrials.gov NCT04127032; https://www.clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04127032
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It has become an inevitable trend for China to enter an aging society. The rapid growth of the elderly population has placed a huge burden on the existing medical system. Existing telemedicine APPs do not take into account the characteristics and preferences of the elderly. In order to help the elderly better accept and use the telemedicine system and improve user satisfaction. It is proposed to optimize the telemedicine interface design based on the double diamond model, and the design process around the four stages of exploration, definition, development and interaction is explained in detail. Through semi-structured interviews with the elderly and designers, the user needs of the elderly for telemedicine and the design elements, tools and methods of the telemedicine interface for the elderly were obtained. Draw a user experience journey map and conduct telemedicine interface design practice for the elderly. Improve the elderly’s experience of using telemedicine, improve the comfort performance of products, and promote the development of the elderly health industry.
Conference Paper
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Large language models (LLMs) can generate personas based on prompts that describe the target user group. To understand what kind of personas LLMs generate, we investigate the diversity and bias in 450 LLM-generated personas with the help of internal evaluators (n=4) and subject-matter experts (SMEs) (n=5). The research findings reveal biases in LLM-generated personas, particularly in age, occupation, and pain points, as well as a strong bias towards personas from the United States. Human evaluations demonstrate that LLM persona descriptions were informative, believable, positive, relatable, and not stereotyped. The SMEs rated the personas slightly more stereotypical, less positive, and less relatable than the internal evaluators. The findings suggest that LLMs can generate consistent personas perceived as believable, relatable, and informative while containing relatively low amounts of stereotyping.
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The purpose of this study is to expand the stimulus‒organism‒response model to explore the impact of short video users’ persona perception on their purchase intention on short video platforms in the context of Chinese short video marketing. The model is empirically tested using structural equation modeling and survey data collected from 350 short video users. The results show that 10 of the 11 hypotheses in the research model are supported and have reliable prediction accuracy. Short video users’ persona perception of each dimension has a significant positive impact on shared value creation. This study thus constructs mediating and moderating variables by exploring the internal correlation and intermediate mechanism between short video users’ persona perception and purchase intention. First, shared value creation plays a mediating role between persona perception and purchase intention on short video platforms. Second, two individual-level moderating variables play a moderating role between shared value creation and purchase intention across short video platforms: Regulatory focus and social presence. This research therefore provides useful implications and guidance for brands and merchants seeking targeted and efficient precision marketing on short video platforms. It also enriches the theoretical research on consumer behavior on short video platforms.
Conference Paper
This paper presents findings from an exploratory study investigating the use of AI text-generation tools to support novice designers in persona creation. We conducted a workshop with 22 undergraduate students enrolled in an introductory human-computer interaction course, who were instructed to use GPT-3 in the creation of personas. These novice designers were able to use GPT-3 to iterate to produce satisfactory personas, particularly when providing detailed prompts. Our findings suggest that personas created with GPT-3 assistance were mostly comparable to those created manually but rated lower on some evaluation dimensions. The study also reveals merits and concerns of using GPT-3 for persona creation. Based on our findings, we propose recommendations for novice designers on how to use text-generative AI to create personas effectively and responsibly.
Chapter
In a prior study, our team created research-based personas through an iterative, mixed-methods approach; however, as a B2B SaaS (business-to-business, software as a service) company, we faced unique challenges not only when generating those personas but evangelizing them throughout our organization. In examining the existing literature on persona building, we notice a distinct gap in reflecting on the organizational buy-in of these personas after their development. Much of the research in this area emphasizes the “how” of persona building, without exploring their ultimate impact, utility, and effectiveness in an actual organization. Therefore, the current study will explore the aftermath of persona generation, assessing adoption within our organization. To this end, we implemented a survey to assess employee perceptions of our user personas a year after their development, both within and outside of the product team. Measures within the survey assessed persona perceptions [10], awareness, and perceived utility. Additional open ended questions asked employees about any hesitations they have regarding our user personas that might lead them to not adopt them, opportunities for educating the broader organization on the existence of and utility of these personas, and how employees are using personas to influence decisions and communicate today. Analysis of these open ended questions helped define future directions for our personas, and additional education to facilitate organizational adoption of personas and effective communication about our users.KeywordsPersona GenerationPersona ImpactOrganizational Adoption
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Compensating crowdworkers for their research participation often entails paying a flat rate to all participants, regardless of the amount of time they spend on the task or skill level. If the actual time required varies considerably between workers, flat rates may yield unfair compensation. To study this matter, we analyzed three survey studies with varying complexity. Based on the United Kingdom minimum wage and actual task completion times, we found that more than 3 in 4 (76.5%) of the crowdworkers studied were paid more than the intended hourly wage, and around one in four (23.5%) was paid less than the intended hourly wage when using a flat rate compensation model based on estimated completion time. The results indicate that the popular flat rate model falls short as a form of equitable remuneration, when perceiving fairness in the form of compensating one’s time. Flat rate compensation would not be problematic if the workers’ completion times were similar, but this is not the case in reality, as skills and motivation can vary. To overcome this problem, the study proposes three alternative compensation models: Compensation by Normal Distribution, Multi-Objective Fairness, and Post-Hoc Bonuses.
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11 capitole realizate de către zece masterande şi un masterand de la Gestiunea campaniilor de imagine și la care se adaugă trei capitole scrise de invitaţii la cursul de Tehnici promoţionale, respectiv prietenilor de la cele două agenţii de marketing online din Braşov, branduri braşovene de success la rândul lor, Romanian Copywriter şi The Pharmacy.
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Studies in human-computer interaction recommend creating fewer than ten personas, based on stakeholders’ limitations to cognitively process and use personas. However, no existing studies offer empirical support for having fewer rather than more personas. Investigating this matter, thirty-seven participants interacted with five and fifteen personas using an interactive persona system, choosing one persona to design for. Our study results from eye-tracking and survey data suggest that when using interactive persona systems, the number of personas can be increased from the conventionally suggested ‘less than ten’, without significant negative effects on user perceptions or task performance, and with the positive effects of increasing engagement with the personas, having a more diverse representation of the end-user population, as well as users accessing personas from more varied demographic groups for a design task. Using the interactive persona system, users adjusted their information processing style by spending less time on each persona when presented with fifteen personas, while still absorbing a similar amount of information than with five personas, implying that more efficient information processing strategies are applied with more personas. The results highlight the importance of designing interactive persona systems to support users’ browsing of more personas.
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In this chapter, we briefly introduce the critically needed task of data-driven persona evaluation. Although we specifically focus on data-driven, nearly all of the evaluation content applies to other types of personas as well. We highlight the need for evaluation in both persona research and practice, and we introduce techniques for persona evaluation. We discuss what is a good persona and what elements combine to make a good persona. We then introduce the Persona Perception Scale (PPS) that measures user perceptions of personas, moving then to a technical definition of a good persona. We then look at a good persona in terms of use cases, introducing the concept of “personas + x”. We end the chapter using APG for data-driven personas generation and evaluation, chapter takeaways, and discussion questions.
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There has been little research into whether a persona's picture should portray a happy or unhappy individual. We report a user experiment with 235 participants, testing the effects of happy and unhappy image styles on user perceptions, engagement, and personality traits attributed to personas using a mixed-methods analysis. Results indicate that the participant's perceptions of the persona's realism and pain point severity increase with the use of unhappy pictures. In contrast, personas with happy pictures are perceived as more extroverted, agreeable, open, conscientious, and emotionally stable. The participants’ proposed design ideas for the personas scored more lexical empathy scores for happy personas. There were also significant perception changes along with the gender and ethnic lines regarding both empathy and perceptions of pain points. Implications are the facial expression in the persona profile can affect the perceptions of those employing the personas. Therefore, persona designers should align facial expressions with the task for which the personas will be employed. Generally, unhappy images emphasize realism and pain point severity, and happy images invoke positive perceptions.
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Business simulation games have been adopted as a learning strategy by companies and universities. However, real-time monitoring and analysis of the use of these resources has not been sufficiently studied. This work presents initial results of a research whose final objective is to present the definition of an optimized model of simulators for organizational environments, based on the analysis of user experience supported by physiological feedback devices and neuroscientific concepts. The first collections carried out with participants from Brazil and Spain during the experimentation with three games point to important design, and usability elements that are meaningfull and stimulating for its users, such as the graphical interface, the interaction of resources and easy visualization. Based on these results and future collections, it is expected to structure the proposal of a tool model capable of preparing and motivating professionals to develop the skills and technical knowledge required by the world of work.
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We analyze the effect of a smile in personas pictures on persona perceptions, including credibility, likability, similarity, and willingness to use. We conduct an online experiment with 2,400 participants using a 16-item survey and multiple persona profile treatments of which half have a smiling photo and half do not. We find that persona profiles with a smiling photo result in an increase in perceived similarity with, likability of, and willingness to use the personas. In contrast, a smile does not increase the credibility of the personas. Our research has implications for the design of persona profiles and adds to previous findings of persona research that the picture choice influences individuals' persona perceptions in profound ways.
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Increased access to data and computational techniques enable innovations in the space of automated customer analytics, for example, automatic persona generation. Automatic persona generation is the process of creating data-driven representations from user or customer statistics. Even though automatic persona generation is technically possible and provides advantages compared to manual persona creation regarding the speed and freshness of the personas, it is not clear (a) what information to include in the persona profiles and (b) how to display that information. To query into these aspects relating information design of personas, we conducted a user study with 38 participants. In the findings, we report several challenges relating to the design of automatically generated persona profiles, including usability issues, perceptual issues, and issues relating to information content. Our research has implications for the information design of data-driven personas.
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As the quantity of social and online analytics data has drastically increased, a wide variety of methods are deployed to make sense of this data, typically via computational and algorithmic approaches. However, in many cases, these approaches trade one form of complexity for another by ignoring the principles of human cognitive processing. In this perspective manuscript, we propose an approach of employing Personas as an alternative form of making large volumes of online user analytics information useful to end users of the user and customer analytics, with results applicable in software development, business sectors, communication industry, and other domains where understanding online user behavior is deemed important. Toward this end, we have developed a system that automatically generates data-driven Personas from social media and online analytics data, capable of handling hundreds of millions of user interactions from tens of thousands of pieces of content on YouTube, Facebook and Google Analytics, while retaining the privacy of individual users of those channels. Our approach (1) identifies and prioritizes user segments by their online behavior, (2) associates the segments with demographic data, and (3) creates rich Persona profiles by dynamically adding characteristics, such as names, photos, and descriptive quotes. This chapter characterizes the currently open research problems in automatic Persona generation, such as de-aggregation of data, cross-platform data mapping, filtering of toxic comments, and choosing the right information content according to end-user needs. Addressing these problems requires the use of state-of-the-art techniques of computer and information science within one system and benefits greatly from inter-disciplinary collaboration. Overall, the research agenda set in this work aims at achieving the vision for automatic user profiling using diverse online and social media platforms and advanced data processing methods for the end goal of making complex analytics data more useful for human decision makers, especially those working with online content.
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In this critique, we conceptually examine the use of personas in an age of availability of large-scale online analytics data. Based on the criticism and benefits outlined in prior work, we formulate the major arguments for and against the use of personas, analyze these arguments, and demonstrate areas for the productive employment of personas by leveraging digital analytics data in their creation. From our review of the prior literature and the given availability of online customer data, our key tenet is that personas are located between aggregated and individual statistics. At their best, personas capture the coverage of the customer base attributed to aggregated data representations while retaining the interpretability of individual-level analytics. Persona creation benefits from both novel computational techniques and data sources. To demonstrate this, we propose and implement automatically generated personas primarily based on quantitative data. We also review key persona validation issues and examine how these issues can be addressed with automated persona generation using real user data from online analytics platforms. Finally, we outline areas of future research in the persona domain within the field of digital marketing and advertising. Overall, to survive in the rapidly developing marketing industry and online customer analytics, personas must evolve by adopting new practices. There are implications for this evolution of personas in a variety of domains, including design, content creation, and digital marketing.
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We develop a methodology to automate creating imaginary people, referred to as personas, by processing complex behavioral and demographic data of social media audiences. From a popular social media account containing more than 30 million interactions by viewers from 198 countries engaging with more than 4,200 online videos produced by a global media corporation, we demonstrate that our methodology has several novel accomplishments, including: (a) identifying distinct user behavioral segments based on the user content consumption patterns; (b) identifying impactful demographics groupings; and (c) creating rich persona descriptions by automatically adding pertinent attributes, such as names, photos, and personal characteristics. We validate our approach by implementing the methodology into an actual working system; we then evaluate it via quantitative methods by examining the accuracy of predicting content preference of personas, the stability of the personas over time, and the generalizability of the method via applying to two other datasets. Research findings show the approach can develop rich personas representing the behavior and demographics of real audiences using privacy-preserving aggregated online social media data from major online platforms. Results have implications for media companies and other organizations distributing content via online platforms.
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In 1950, Alan Turing proposed his concept of universal machines, emphasizing their abilities to learn, think, and behave in a human-like manner. Today, the existence of intelligent agents imitating human characteristics is more relevant than ever. They have expanded to numerous aspects of daily life. Yet, while they are often seen as work simplifiers, their interactions usually lack social competence. In particular, they miss what one may call authenticity. In the study presented in this paper, we explore how characteristics of social intelligence may enhance future agent implementations. Interviews and an open question survey with experts from different fields have led to a shared understanding of what it would take to make intelligent virtual agents, in particular messaging agents (i.e., chat bots), more authentic. Results suggest that showcasing a transparent purpose, learning from experience, anthropomorphizing, human-like conversational behavior, and coherence, are guiding characteristics for agent authenticity and should consequently allow for and support a better coexistence of artificial intelligence technology with its respective users.
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A method to shift a company towards user-centred thinking and product development is the use of personas. Personas are archetypical representations of real users. They summarise what we know about our customers or users; they are based on research and data (quantitative and qualitative research). Sometimes personas are developed by the marketing department, sometimes by the User Experience (UX) department. Typically, they are based on qualitative research like user interviews, observation, contextual research, and usability testing. Why should we use them? What should we be aware of?
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We propose a novel approach for isolating customer segments using online customer data for products that are distributed via online social media platforms. We use non-negative matrix factorization to first identify behavioral customer segments and then to identify demographic customer segments. We employ a methodology for linking the two segments to present integrated and holistic customer segments, also known as personas. Behavioral segments are generated from customer interactions with online content. Demographic segments are generated using the gender, age, and location of these customers. In addition to evaluating our approach, we demonstrate its practicality via a system leveraging these customer segments to automatically generate personas, which are fictional but accurate representations of each integrated behavioral and demographic segment. Results show that this approach can accurately identify both behavioral and demographical customer segments using actual online customer data from which we can generate personas representing real groups of people.
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Understanding users in the era of social media is challenging, requiring organizations to adopt novel computation-aided approaches. To exemplify such an approach, we retrieved information on millions of interactions with YouTube video content from a major Middle Eastern media outlet, to automatically generate personas that capture how different audience segments interact with thousands of individual content pieces. Then, we used qualitative data to provide additional insights into the automatically generated persona profiles. Our findings provide insights into social media usage in the Middle East and demonstrate the application of a novel methodology that generates culturally adapted personas of social media audiences, summarizing complex social analytics data into human portrayals that are easy to understand by end users in real organizations.
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We report findings and implications from a semi-naturalistic user study of a system for Automatic Persona Generation (APG) using large-scale audience data of an organization's social media channels conducted at the workplace of a major international corporation. Thirteen participants from a range of positions within the company engaged with the system in a use case scenario. We employed a variety of data collection methods, including mouse tracking and survey data, analyzing the data with a mixed method approach. Results show that having an interactive system may aid in keeping personas at the forefront while making customer-centric decisions and indicate that data-driven personas fulfill information needs of decision makers by mixing personas and numerical data. The findings have implications for the design of persona systems and the use of online analytics data to better understand users and customers.
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In this research, we investigate if and how more photos than a single headshot can heighten the level of information provided by persona profiles. We conduct eye-tracking experiments and qualitative interviews with variations in the photos: a single headshot, a headshot and images of the persona in different contexts, and a headshot with pictures of different people representing key persona attributes. The results show that more contextual photos significantly improve the information end users derive from a persona profile; however, showing images of different people creates confusion and lowers the informativeness. Moreover, we discover that choice of pictures results in various interpretations of the persona that are biased by the end users' experiences and preconceptions. The results imply that persona creators should consider the design power of photos when creating persona profiles.
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Personas are widely used in software development, system design, and HCI studies. Yet, their evaluation is difficult, and there are no recognized and validated measurement scales to date. To improve this condition, this research develops a persona perception scale based on reviewing relevant literature. We validate the scale through a pilot study with 19 participants, each evaluating three personas (57 evaluations in total). This is the first reported effort to systematically develop and validate an instrument for persona perception measurement. We find the constructs and items of the scale perform well, with factor loadings ranging between 0.60 and 0.95. Reliability, measured as Cronbach's Alpha, is also satisfactory, encouraging us to pursue the use of the scale with a larger sample in future work.
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One of the reasons for using personas is to align user understandings across project teams and sites. As part of a larger persona study, at Al Jazeera English (AJE), we conducted 16 qualitative interviews with media producers, the end users of persona descriptions. We asked the participants about their understanding of a typical AJE media consumer, and the variety of answers shows that the understandings are not aligned and are built on a mix of own experiences, own self, assumptions, and data given by the company. The answers are sometimes aligned with the data-driven personas and sometimes not. The end users are divided in two groups: news producers who have little interest in having data-based insights of news consumers and producers for social media platforms who have more interest in this information.
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Personas often aim to improve product designers' ability to "see through the eyes of" target users through the empathy personas can inspire - but personas are also known to promote stereotyping. This tension can be particularly problematic when personas (who, of course as "people" have genders) are used to promote gender inclusiveness - because reinforcing stereotypical perceptions can run counter to gender inclusiveness. In this paper we explicitly investigate this tension through a new approach to personas: one that includes multiple photos (of males and females) for a single persona. We compared this approach to an identical persona with only one photo using a controlled laboratory study and an eye-tracking study. Our goal was to answer the following question: is it possible for personas to encourage product designers to engage with personas while at the same avoiding promoting gender stereotyping? Our results are encouraging about the use of personas with multiple pictures as a way to expand participants' consideration of multiple genders without reducing their engagement with the persona.
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Personas are a widely used tool to keep real users in mind, while avoiding stereotypical thinking in the design process. Yet, creating personas can be challenging. Starting from Cooper's approach for constructing personas, this paper details how behavioral theory can contribute substantially to the development of personas. We describe a case study in which Self-Determination Theory (SDT) is used to develop five distinctive personas for the design of a digital coach for sustainable weight loss. We show how behavioral theories such as SDT can help to understand what genuinely drives and motivates users to sustainably change their behavior. In our study, we used SDT to prepare and analyze interviews with envisioned users of the coach and to create complex, yet engaging and highly realistic personas that make users' basic psychological needs explicit. The paper ends with a critical reflection on the use of behavioral theories to create personas, discussing both challenges and strengths.
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These data result from an investigation examining the interplay between dyadic rapport and consequential behavior-mirroring. Participants responded to a variety of interpersonally-focused pretest measures prior to their engagement in videotaped interdependent tasks (coded for interactional synchrony using Motion Energy Analysis [17,18]). A post-task evaluation of rapport and other related constructs followed each exchange. Four studies shared these same dependent measures, but asked distinct questions: Study 1 (Ndyad = 38) explored the influence of perceived responsibility and gender-specificity of the task; Study 2 (Ndyad = 51) focused on dyad sex-makeup; Studies 3 (Ndyad = 41) and 4 (Ndyad = 63) examined cognitive load impacts on the interactions. Versions of the data are structured with both individual and dyad as the unit of analysis. Our data possess strong reuse potential for theorists interested in dyadic processes and are especially pertinent to questions about dyad agreement and interpersonal perception / behavior association relationships.
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Background Two experiments investigated the effect of features of human behaviour on the quality of interaction with an Embodied Conversational Agent (ECA). Methods In Experiment 1, visual prominence cues (head nod, eyebrow raise) of the ECA were manipulated to explore the hypothesis that likeability of an ECA increases as a function of interpersonal mimicry. In the context of an error detection task, the ECA either mimicked or did not mimic a head nod or brow raise that humans produced to give emphasis to a word when correcting the ECA’s vocabulary. In Experiment 2, presence versus absence of facial expressions on comprehension accuracy of two computer-driven ECA monologues was investigated. ResultsIn Experiment 1, evidence for a positive relationship between ECA mimicry and lifelikeness was obtained. However, a mimicking agent did not elicit more human gestures. In Experiment 2, expressiveness was associated with greater comprehension and higher ratings of humour and engagement. Conclusion Influences from mimicry can be explained by visual and motor simulation, and bidirectional links between similarity and liking. Cue redundancy and minimizing cognitive load are potential explanations for expressiveness aiding comprehension.
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Using personas in requirement analysis and software development is becoming more and more common. The potential and problems with this method of user representation are discussed controversially in HCI research. While personas might help focus on the audience, prioritize, challenge assumptions, and prevent self-referential design, the success of the method depends on how and on what basis the persona descriptions are developed, perceived, and employed. Personas run the risk of reinscribing existing stereotypes and following more of an I-methodological than a user-centered approach. This paper gives an overview of the academic discourse regarding benefits and downfalls of the persona method. A semi-structured interview study researched how usability experts perceive and navigate the controversies of this discourse. The qualitative analysis showed that conflicting paradigms are embedded in the legitimization practices of HCI in the political realities of computer science and corporate settings leading to contradictions and compromises.
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In a recent article on conducting international marketing research in the twenty-first century (Craig & Douglas 2001), the application of new (electronic) technology for data collection was encouraged. Email and web-based data collection methods are attractive to researchers in international marketing because of low costs and fast response rates. Yet the conventional wisdom is that, as some people still do not have access to email and the Internet, such datacollection techniques may often result in a sample of respondents that is not representative of the desired population. In this article we evaluate multimode strategies of data collection that include web-based, email and postal methods as a means for the international marketing researcher to obtain survey data from a representative sample. An example is given of a multimode strategy applied to the collection of survey data from a sample of respondents across 100 countries.
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The persona method is gaining widespread use and support. Many researchers have reported from single cases and from novel domains of how they have used the method. However the way companies and design groups describe personas has not been the focus of attention. This paper analyses 47 descriptions from 13 companies and compare these to an analysis of recommendations from 11 templates from literature. Furthermore 28 interviews with Danish practitioners with experience in using personas are analyzed for content on persona descriptions. The study finds that a Danish persona style has developed that is different from the recommendations; two differences are the lack of marketing and business related information and the absence of goals as differentiator for personas. The inspiration and knowledge on personas originates from co-workers and seminars and not much from literature. This indicates that the community of practice influences the persona style.
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Health and care providers are increasingly looking to online and peer-to-peer services to supplement existing channels of assistive living technology (ALTs) provision and assessment. We describe the findings from 12 co-design workshops with 28 people from the UK representing a range of older people with and without health conditions, users of ALT and carers for people using such devices. The workshops were conducted to explore issues related to finding reliable information about ALT with the goal of gathering requirements for the design of a peer-to-peer knowledge sharing platform. Our analysis highlights how a current reliance on peers and informal networks relates to a desire to establish the authenticity and relatability of another person's experience to one's own circumstances. This connects to a perceived mistrust in information where provenance and authenticity is not clear. We use these to critique the wisdom of taking an e-marketplace and recommendation service approach to ALT provision and assessment, and offer alternatives based on our findings.
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This video -A Machine. Learning -adopts a 'research through design' approach [4] to producing a design fiction prototype [2,7]. By using a research through design approach that is grounded in the practical experience of creating a design fiction we contribute practical insights about the process of creating a design fiction for HCI. Reflecting on the production of the video we explore challenges and opportunities presented by the design fiction method when it is applied to near-future HCI scenarios. The video depicts the story of Manu and his new artificially intelligent portable device. In the paper we consider the video, using it as a means to contrast design fiction with other approaches to prototyping; we describe the story, content and style of the video; finally we reflect on the production of the video (writing, filming and editing processes) in order to offer practical insights to the HCI community, with regards to prototyping using design fiction and film.
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Human responses to android and humanoid robots have become an important topic to social scientists due to the increasing prevalence of social and service robots in everyday life. The present research connects work on the effects of lateral (sideward) head tilts, an eminent feature of nonverbal human behavior, to the experience of android and humanoid robots. In two experiments (N = 402; N = 253) the influence of lateral head tilts on user perceptions of android and humanoid robots were examined. Photo portrayals of three different robots were manipulated. The stimuli included head tilts of -20°, -10° (left tilt), +10°, +20° (right tilt) and 0° (upright position). Compared to an upright head posture, we found higher scores for attributed human-likeness, cuteness, and spine-tinglingness when the identical robots conveyed a head tilt. Results for perceived warmth, eeriness, attractiveness, and dominance varied with the robot or head-tilts yielded no effects. Implications for the development and marketing of android and humanoid robots are discussed.
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As humans we are a highly social species: in order to coordinate our joint actions and assure successful communication, we use language skills to explicitly convey information to each other, and social abilities such as empathy or perspective taking to infer another person’s emotions and mental state. The human cognitive capacity to draw inferences about other peoples’ beliefs, intentions and thoughts has been termed mentalizing, theory of mind or cognitive perspective taking. This capacity makes it possible, for instance, to understand that people may have views that differ from our own. Conversely, the capacity to share the feelings of others is called empathy. Empathy makes it possible to resonate with others’ positive and negative feelings alike — we can thus feel happy when we vicariously share the joy of others and we can share the experience of suffering when we empathize with someone in pain. Importantly, in empathy one feels with someone, but one does not confuse oneself with the other; that is, one still knows that the emotion one resonates with is the emotion of another. If this self–other distinction is not present, we speak of emotion contagion, a precursor of empathy that is already present in babies.
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Scaling and sustaining educational innovations is a common problem in the learning sciences. Professional development resources around educational innovations that are personalized to appeal to the needs and motivations of different types of faculty offer a possible solution. The method of developing personas to represent key types of users is commonly employed in user-interface design and can be used to produce personalized resources. Personas are fictional named archetypes of users encompassing generalizations of their key characteristics and goals that emerge from interviews. This method is especially powerful because personas succinctly package information into the form of a person, who is easily understood and reasoned about. Herein we describe the creation of a set of personas focusing on the needs and motivations of physics faculty around assessment and teaching. We present the personas, a discussion of how they inform our design and how the method can be used more broadly.
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The persona method is gaining widespread use and support. Many researchers have reported from single cases and novel domains how they have used the method. Few have conducted literature studies in order to identify and discuss the different understandings of the method. Fewer still have reported on ethnographic studies of practice. This paper falls within the last category, reporting on a study on how practitioners in Denmark use the method, and their perceptions of benefits and challenges when using the method. Finally, different casts of personas obtained from the involved companies are analyzed. The findings are compared to reported studies of practice. Contrary to the existing findings the study reports that the method is well integrated into existing practices.
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Personas are a critical method for orienting design and development teams to user experience. Prior work has noted challenges in justifying them to developers. In contrast, it has been assumed that designers and user experience professionals - whose goal is to focus designs on targeted users - will readily exploit personas. This paper examines that assumption. We present the first study of how experienced user-centered design (UCD) practitioners with prior experience deploying personas, use and perceive personas in industrial software design. We identify limits to the persona approach in the context studied. Practitioners used personas almost exclusively for communication, but not for design. Participants identified four problems with personas, finding them abstract, impersonal, misleading and distracting. Our findings argue for a new approach to persona deployment and construction. Personas cannot replace immersion in actual user data. And rather than focusing on creating engaging personas, it is critical to avoid persona attributes that mislead or distract.
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We analyze the effect of using smiling/non-smiling and stock photo/non-stock photo pictures in persona profiles on four key persona perceptions, including credibility, likability, similarity, and willingness to use. For this, we collect data from an experiment with 2,400 participants using a 16-item survey instrument and multiple persona profile treatments of which half have a smiling photo/stock photo and half do not. The results from structural equation modeling, supplemented by a qualitative analysis, show that a smile enhances the perceived similarity with the persona, similar personas are more liked, and that likability increases the willingness to use a persona. In contrast, the use of stock photos decreases the perceived similarity with the persona as well as persona credibility, both of which are significant predictors to a willingness to use a persona. These professionally crafted stock-photos seem to diminish the sense of identification with the persona. The above effects are consistent across the tested ages, genders, and races of the persona picture, although the effect sizes tend to be small. The results suggest that persona creators should use smiling pictures of real people to evoke positive perceptions toward the personas. In addition to presenting quantitative evidence on the predictors of willingness to use a persona, our research has implications for the design of persona profiles, showing that the picture choice influences individuals’ persona perceptions even when the other persona information is identical.
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Creativity is considered a human characteristic; creative endeavors, including automatic story generation, have been a major challenge for artificial intelligences. To understand how humans create and evaluate stories, we (1) construct a story dataset and (2) analyze the relationship between emotions and story interestingness. Given that understanding how to move readers emotionally is a crucial creative technique, we focus on the role of emotions in evaluating reader satisfaction. Although conventional research has highlighted emotions read from a text, we hypothesize that readers’ emotions do not necessarily coincide with those of the characters. The story dataset created for this study describes situations surrounding two characters. Crowdsourced volunteers label stories with the emotions of the two characters and those of readers; we then empirically analyze the relationship between emotions and interestingness. The results show that a story's score has a stronger relationship to the readers’ emotions than the characters’ emotions.
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We investigate whether additional photos beyond a single headshot makes a persona profile more informative without confusing the end user. We conduct an eye-tracking experiment and qualitative interviews with digital content creators after varying the persona in photos via a single headshot, a headshot and photo of the persona in different contexts, and a headshot with photos of different people with key persona attributes the gender and age. Findings show that contextual photos provide significantly more persona information to end users; however, showing photos of multiple people engenders confusion and lowers informativeness. Also, as anticipated, viewing additional photos requires more cognitive focus, which is measured by eye-tracking metrics; these metrics are correlated with levels of informativeness and confusion. Furthermore, various interpretations of the persona based on the choice of photos are biased by the end users’ experiences and preconceptions. Concerning persona design, findings indicate that persona creators need to consider the intended persona use objectives when selecting photos and when producing persona profiles. Using contextual photos can improve informativeness, but this demands more cognitive focus from end users. Thus, adding contextual photos increases the perceived informativeness of the persona profile without being obfuscating, but multiple photos of different people do evoke confusion about the targeted persona.
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This study aims to integrate diverse data within narrative multimedia (i.e., artworks containing stories and distributed through multimedia) into a unified character network (i.e., a social network between characters that appear in the story). By combining multiple data sources (e.g., the text, video, and audio), we attempted to enhance the accuracy and semantic richness of existing character networks that confine themselves to a particular data source. To merge various data, we propose story synchronization for (i) improving the accuracy of data extracted from the narrative multimedia and (ii) integrating the data into the unified character network. The story synchronization mainly consists of three steps: synchronizing (i) scenes, (ii) characters, and (iii) character networks. First, we synchronize dialogues in the text and audio, to discover speakers and time of dialogues. This enables us to segment the scene using time periods when dialogues (in the text and audio) and characters (in the video) do not commonly occur. Through the scene segmentation, we can discretize stories in the narrative work. By comparing the occurrence of dialogues and characters in each scene, we synchronize identities of the characters in the text and video (e.g., names and faces of characters). Thereby, we can more accurately estimate participants and time of a conversation between characters (i.e., a set of connected dialogues). Based on the conversation, the existing character networks are refined and integrated into the unified character network. In addition, we verified the efficacy of the proposed methods using movies in the real world, which are among the most accessible and popular narrative multimedia.