Data-driven personas are a significant advancement in the fields of human-centered informatics and human-computer interaction. Data-driven personas enhance user understanding by combining the empathy inherent with personas with the rationality inherent in analytics using computational methods. Via the employment of these computational methods, the data-driven persona method permits the use of large-scale user data, which is a novel advancement in persona creation.

A common approach for increasing stakeholder engagement about audiences, customers, or users, persona creation remained relatively unchanged for several decades. However, the availability of digital user data, data science algorithms, and easy access to analytics platforms provide avenues and opportunities to enhance personas from often sketchy representations of user segments to precise, actionable, interactive decision-making tools—data-driven personas! Using the data-driven approach, the persona profile can serve as an interface to a fully functional analytics system that can present user representation at various levels of information granularity for more task-aligned user insights.

We trace the techniques that have enabled the development of data-driven personas and then conceptually frame how one can leverage data-driven personas as tools for both empathizing with and understanding of users. Presenting a conceptual framework consisting of (a) persona benefits, (b) analytics benefits, and (c) decision-making outcomes, we illustrate applying this framework via practical use cases in areas of system design, digital marketing, and content creation to demonstrate the application of data-driven personas in practical applied situations.

We then present an overview of a fully functional data-driven persona system as an example of multi-level information aggregation needed for decision making about users. We demonstrate that data-driven personas systems can provide critical, empathetic, and user-understanding functionalities for anyone needing such insights.
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CONTENTS

• Introduction
• The Data-Driven Persona Revolution
• Getting Your Organization Data-Driven-Persona Ready
• Getting Meaningful Data
• Creating Data-Driven Personas
• Data-Driven Personas as Interfaces for Persona Analytics Systems
• Challenges of Applying Data-Driven Persona Development
• Use Cases for Data-Driven Personas
• Using Data-Driven Personas Alongside Other Human-Computer Interaction (HCI Techniques)
• Evaluating Data-Driven Personas
• Selecting the Appropriate Persona Creation Method
• Dispelling Myths and Laying Out the Grand Challenges of Data-Driven Personas
• Author Biographies

For our book, “Data-Driven Personas”, one of the personas that we are designing the book’s content for is the system designer, Sam.

We are keeping Sam, the system designer, in mind while designing the book.

1. The ~200 page book is organized into 10 coherent chapters, so it is nicely tailored for easy access to the specifics that are needed to onboard data-driven personas in the organization.
2. There is a specific chapter focused EXCLUSIVELY on the Education - Investment - Employment Process for onboarding data-driven personas to the organization.
3. There is a dedicated chapter with 12 actionable use cases for data-driven personas, along with four appendices geared to implementing data-driven personas.

Data-Driven Personas by Bernard J. Jansen, Joni O. Salminen, Kathleen Guan, and Soon-Gyo Jung Hamad Bin Khalifa University (HBKU) and University College London. Synthesis Lectures on Human-Centered Informatics. Morgan & Claypool Publishers
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Chapters for Data-Driven Personas, a Morgan-Claypool Publication https://persona.qcri.org/blog/chapters-for-data-driven-personas-a-morgan-claypool-publication/

Acknowledgements for Data-Driven Personas, a Morgan-Claypool Publication https://persona.qcri.org/blog/acknowledgements-for-data-driven-personas-a-morgan-claypool-publication/

Update Data-Driven Personas Book for Ting, the researcher https://persona.qcri.org/blog/update-data-driven-personas-books-for-ting/

Update – Data-Driven Personas book for Kristi, the professor https://persona.qcri.org/blog/update-data-driven-personas-book/
​
Personas for Book on Data-Driven Personas https://persona.qcri.org/blog/personas-for-book-on-data-driven-personas/

For our book, “Data-Driven Personas”, one of the personas that we are designing the book’s content for is the marketing researcher, Ting.


We are keeping Ting, the marketing researcher, in mind while designing the book.

1. There is a chapter with 12 actionable use cases for data-driven personas, along with four appendices geared to implementing data-driven personas. Several of these use cases focus on segmentation and marketing
2. The ~200 page book is organized into 10 coherent chapters, including at least three chapters that make the link between data-driven personas and analytics.
3. Each chapter is sprinkled with research insights and ties of data-driven personas to commercial setting. The final chapter outlines the grand challenges of persona analytics, which are fantastic research topics.

Data-Driven Personas by Bernard J. Jansen, Joni O. Salminen, Kathleen Guan, and Soon-Gyo Jung Hamad Bin Khalifa University (HBKU) and University College London. Synthesis Lectures on Human-Centered Informatics. Morgan & Claypool Publishers
Chapters for Data-Driven Personas, a Morgan-Claypool Publication https://persona.qcri.org/blog/chapters-for-data-driven-personas-a-morgan-claypool-publication/

Acknowledgements for Data-Driven Personas, a Morgan-Claypool Publication https://persona.qcri.org/blog/acknowledgements-for-data-driven-personas-a-morgan-claypool-publication/

Update – Data-Driven Personas Book for Sam, the system designer https://persona.qcri.org/blog/update-data-driven-personas-book-for-sam-the-system-designer/

Update – Data-Driven Personas book for Kristi, the professor https://persona.qcri.org/blog/update-data-driven-personas-book/

Personas for Book on Data-Driven Personas https://persona.qcri.org/blog/personas-for-book-on-data-driven-personas/

Our book, Data-Driven Personas by Bernard J. Jansen, Joni O. Salminen, Soon-Gyo Jung, and Kathleen Guan, Hamad Bin Khalifa University (HBKU) and University College London. Morgan & Claypool Publishers.
The book is comprised of 12 chapters (10 content chapters, plus an introduction and conclusion chapter) divided into 6 themed sections.
Plus, we are adding as a bonus, 3 appendices that practitioners (and researchers) will find valuable.

Appendix A: Survey Questions for Persona Perception Scale - this is an instrument that has been validate to test how your personas are perceived by stakeholders.

Appendix B: User Interview Questions for Developing Data-Driven Personas - this is a set of hundreds of user interview questions, categorized, for development persons
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Appendix C: Evaluation of Elements in a Variety of Persona Tools - this is an element by element evaluation of all the major data-driven personas templates
Coming soon! (i.e., early 2021)
Chapters for Data-Driven Personas, a Morgan-Claypool Publication https://persona.qcri.org/blog/chapters-for-data-driven-personas-a-morgan-claypool-publication/

Acknowledgements for Data-Driven Personas, a Morgan-Claypool Publication https://persona.qcri.org/blog/acknowledgements-for-data-driven-personas-a-morgan-claypool-publication/

Update – Data-Driven Personas Book for Sam, the system designer https://persona.qcri.org/blog/update-data-driven-personas-book-for-sam-the-system-designer/

Update Data-Driven Personas Book for Ting, the researcher https://persona.qcri.org/blog/update-data-driven-personas-books-for-ting/

Update – Data-Driven Personas book for Kristi, the professor https://persona.qcri.org/blog/update-data-driven-personas-book/
Personas for Book on Data-Driven Personas https://persona.qcri.org/blog/personas-for-book-on-data-driven-personas/

For our book, "Data-Driven Personas", we have three personas that we used to design the book's content.

Data-Driven Personas by Bernard J. Jansen, Joni O. Salminen, Kathleen Guan, and Soon-Gyo Jung Hamad Bin Khalifa University (HBKU) and Georgetown University. Synthesis Lectures on Human-Centered Informatics
Morgan & Claypool Publishers
Chapters for Data-Driven Personas, a Morgan-Claypool Publication https://persona.qcri.org/blog/chapters-for-data-driven-personas-a-morgan-claypool-publication/

Acknowledgements for Data-Driven Personas, a Morgan-Claypool Publication https://persona.qcri.org/blog/acknowledgements-for-data-driven-personas-a-morgan-claypool-publication/

Update – Data-Driven Personas Book for Sam, the system designer https://persona.qcri.org/blog/update-data-driven-personas-book-for-sam-the-system-designer/

Update Data-Driven Personas Book for Ting, the researcher https://persona.qcri.org/blog/update-data-driven-personas-books-for-ting/

Update – Data-Driven Personas book for Kristi, the professor https://persona.qcri.org/blog/update-data-driven-personas-book/

We finished our book, Data-Driven Personas by Bernard J. Jansen, Joni O. Salminen, Soon-Gyo Jung, and Kathleen Guan, Hamad Bin Khalifa University (HBKU) and University College London. Morgan & Claypool Publishers.
Here's how it all began!

"In November 2015, a chance meeting between Dr. Jim Jansen and representatives of AJ+, an Al Jazeera social media channel, led to a discussion of the difficulties of using the many analytics platforms available. It was at that meeting the concept of Automatic Persona Generation (APG) emerged. That meeting led to a set of algorithmic approaches to improve user understanding by presenting analytics and numbers in a form that most people can relate to—another person!"
Data-Driven Persona Book: 596 Cites to Prior Persona Work https://persona.qcri.org/blog/data-driven-persona-book-596-cites-to-prior-persona-work/

Data-Driven Persona Book: 3 Appendices for Making Personas Actionable https://persona.qcri.org/blog/data-driven-persona-book-3-appendices-for-making-personas-actionable/

Chapters for Data-Driven Personas, a Morgan-Claypool Publication https://persona.qcri.org/blog/chapters-for-data-driven-personas-a-morgan-claypool-publication/

Acknowledgements for Data-Driven Personas, a Morgan-Claypool Publication https://persona.qcri.org/blog/acknowledgements-for-data-driven-personas-a-morgan-claypool-publication/

Update – Data-Driven Personas Book for Sam, the system designer https://persona.qcri.org/blog/update-data-driven-personas-book-for-sam-the-system-designer/

Update Data-Driven Personas Book for Ting, the researcher https://persona.qcri.org/blog/update-data-driven-personas-books-for-ting/

Update – Data-Driven Personas book for Kristi, the professor https://persona.qcri.org/blog/update-data-driven-personas-book/
​
Personas for Book on Data-Driven Personas https://persona.qcri.org/blog/personas-for-book-on-data-driven-personas/

We finished our book, Data-Driven Personas by Bernard J. Jansen, Joni O. Salminen, Soon-Gyo Jung, and Kathleen Guan, Hamad Bin Khalifa University (HBKU) and University College London. Morgan & Claypool Publishers.
​
The book has 596 cites to prior persona research and 341 unique references making it one of the most comprehensive bibliographies of existing persona research, highlighting trends for current persona research, and shedding light on directions for future persona research.

It is interesting to note the top cited references in the book, which are:
Aoyama, M. (2005). Persona-and-scenario based requirements engineering for software embedded in digital consumer products. Proceedings of the 13th IEEE International Conference on Requirements Engineering (RE’05), 85–94. https://doi.org/10.1109/RE.2005.50
Brickey, Jon, Walczak, S., & Burgess, T. (2010). A Comparative Analysis of Persona Clustering Methods. Americas Conference on Information Systems (AMCIS2010), 217.
Cooper, A. (2004). The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity (2nd Edition). Pearson Higher Education.
Nielsen, L. (2019). Persona Writing. In L. Nielsen (Ed.), Personas—User Focused Design (pp. 55–81). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-7427-1_4
Nielsen, L., Hansen, K. S., Stage, J., & Billestrup, J. (2015). A Template for Design Personas: Analysis of 47 Persona Descriptions from Danish Industries and Organizations. Int. J. Sociotechnology Knowl. Dev., 7(1), 45–61. https://doi.org/10.4018/ijskd.2015010104
Pruitt, John, and Jonathan Grudin. 2003. “Personas: Practice and Theory.” Pp. 1–15 in Proceedings of the 2003 Conference on Designing for User Experiences, DUX ’03. San Francisco, California, USA: ACM.
Friess, E. (2012). Personas and Decision Making in the Design Process: An Ethnographic Case Study. Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1209–1218. https://doi.org/10.1145/2207676.2208572
Goodwin, K. (2009). Designing for the Digital Age: How to Create Human-Centered Products and Services (1 edition). Wiley.
Pruitt, J., & Adlin, T. (2006). The Persona Lifecycle: Keeping People in Mind Throughout Product Design. Morgan Kaufmann.
Bamman, David, Brendan O’Connor, and Noah A. Smith. 2013. “Learning Latent Personas of Film Characters.” P. 10 in Proceedings of the 51st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. Sofia, Bulgaria.
Chapman, C. N., & Milham, R. P. (2006). The Personas’ New Clothes: Methodological and Practical Arguments against a Popular Method. Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting, 50(5), 634–636. https://doi.org/10.1177/154193120605000503
Chu, Eric, Prashanth Vijayaraghavan, and Deb Roy. 2018. “Learning Personas from Dialogue with Attentive Memory Networks.” Pp. 2638–46 in Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. Brussels, Belgium: Association for Computational Linguistics.
Dang-Pham, Duy, Siddhi Pittayachawan, and Mathews Nkhoma. 2015. “Demystifying Online Personas of Vietnamese Young Adults on Facebook: A Q-Methodology Approach.” Australasian Journal of Information Systems 19(1). doi: 10.3127/ajis.v19i0.1204.
Miaskiewicz, T., Grant, S. J., & Kozar, K. A. (2009). A Preliminary Examination of Using Personas to Enhance User-Centered Design. AMCIS 2009 Proceedings, Article 697
Siegel, David A. 2010. “The Mystique of Numbers: Belief in Quantitative Approaches to Segmentation and Persona Development.” Pp. 4721–32 in CHI ’10 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI EA ’10. New York, NY, USA: ACM.
Tu, N., He, Q., Zhang, T., Zhang, H., Li, Y., Xu, H., & Xiang, Y. (2010). Combine Qualitative and Quantitative Methods to Create Persona. 2010 3rd International Conference on Information Management, Innovation Management and Industrial Engineering, 3, 597–603. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICIII.2010.463
Tychsen, Anders, and Alessandro Canossa. 2008. “Defining Personas in Games Using Metrics.” Pp. 73–80 in Proceedings of the 2008 Conference on Future Play: Research, Play, Share, Future Play ’08. Toronto, Ontario, Canada: ACM.
Vecchio, Pasquale Del, Gioconda Mele, Valentina Ndou, and Giustina Secundo. 2018. “Creating Value from Social Big Data: Implications for Smart Tourism Destinations.” Information Processing & Management 54(5):847–60. doi: 10.1016/j.ipm.2017.10.006.
Watanabe, Y., Washizaki, H., Honda, K., Noyori, Y., Fukazawa, Y., Morizuki, A., Shibata, H., Ogawa, K., Ishigaki, M., Shiizaki, S., Yamaguchi, T., & Yagi, T. (2017). ID3P: Iterative Data-driven Development of Persona Based on Quantitative Evaluation and Revision. Proceedings of the 10th International Workshop on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering, 49–55. https://doi.org/10.1109/CHASE.2017.9
Data-Driven Persona Book: 3 Appendices for Making Personas Actionable https://persona.qcri.org/blog/data-driven-persona-book-3-appendices-for-making-personas-actionable/

Chapters for Data-Driven Personas, a Morgan-Claypool Publication https://persona.qcri.org/blog/chapters-for-data-driven-personas-a-morgan-claypool-publication/

Acknowledgements for Data-Driven Personas, a Morgan-Claypool Publication https://persona.qcri.org/blog/acknowledgements-for-data-driven-personas-a-morgan-claypool-publication/

Update – Data-Driven Personas Book for Sam, the system designer https://persona.qcri.org/blog/update-data-driven-personas-book-for-sam-the-system-designer/

Update Data-Driven Personas Book for Ting, the researcher https://persona.qcri.org/blog/update-data-driven-personas-books-for-ting/

Update – Data-Driven Personas book for Kristi, the professor https://persona.qcri.org/blog/update-data-driven-personas-book/
​
Personas for Book on Data-Driven Personas https://persona.qcri.org/blog/personas-for-book-on-data-driven-personas/

We finished our book, Data-Driven Personas by Bernard J. Jansen, Joni O. Salminen, Soon-Gyo Jung, and Kathleen Guan, Hamad Bin Khalifa University (HBKU) and University College London. Morgan & Claypool Publishers.
​
The book is comprised of 12 chapters (10 content chapters, plus an introduction and conclusion chapter) divided into 6 themed sections.

SECTION 1: Setting the Stage
Introduction

SECTION 2: Getting Ready
Chapter 1: The Data-Driven Persona Revolution
Chapter 2: Getting Your Organization Data-Driven Persona Ready

SECTION 3 Developing Data-Driven Personas
Chapter 3: Getting Meaningful Data
Chapter 4: Creating Data-Driven Personas
Chapter 5: Data-Driven Personas as Interfaces to Persona Analytics System

SECTION 4: Using Data-Driven Personas
Chapter 6: Challenges of Applying Data-Driven Persona Development
Chapter 7: Use Cases for Data-Driven Personas
Chapter 8: Data-Driven Personas With Other User Centered Methods

SECTION 5: Evaluating Data-Driven Personas and Appropriate Persona Methods
Chapter 9: Evaluating Data-Driven Personas
Chapter 10: Selecting the Appropriate Persona Creation Method

SECTION 6: Data-Driven Personas and the Road Ahead
Conclusion: Grand Challenges of Data-Driven Personas

Chapters for Data-Driven Personas, a Morgan-Claypool Publication https://persona.qcri.org/blog/chapters-for-data-driven-personas-a-morgan-claypool-publication/

Acknowledgements for Data-Driven Personas, a Morgan-Claypool Publication https://persona.qcri.org/blog/acknowledgements-for-data-driven-personas-a-morgan-claypool-publication/

Update – Data-Driven Personas Book for Sam, the system designer https://persona.qcri.org/blog/update-data-driven-personas-book-for-sam-the-system-designer/

Update Data-Driven Personas Book for Ting, the researcher https://persona.qcri.org/blog/update-data-driven-personas-books-for-ting/

Update – Data-Driven Personas book for Kristi, the professor https://persona.qcri.org/blog/update-data-driven-personas-book/

​Personas for Book on Data-Driven Personas https://persona.qcri.org/blog/personas-for-book-on-data-driven-personas/

We are finished with our book, Data-Driven Personas by Bernard J. Jansen, Joni O. Salminen, Soon-Gyo Jung, and Kathleen Guan, Hamad Bin Khalifa University (HBKU) and University College London. Morgan & Claypool Publishers.

Taking a multi-year research project and research passion, with all the complexities and energies involved, and transforming all of that into a fairly concise book is difficult -- really difficult!

However, challenging experiences are often rewarding, and the writing of this book is one of those situations - both challenging and rewarding! Challenges are seldom faced alone, and this book is only possible via the support of many individuals. So, we here thank the many individuals that helped make this lecture book happen. Could NOT have done it without you!

Thanks to the executive leadership team at the fabulous Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI), a national research institute within Hamad bin Khalifa University and a member of the Qatar Foundation. Such a great place to work! Dr. Ahmed Elmagarmid is the founding Executive Director of QCRI and is a leading computer scientist researcher, academic supporter, and business executive. Dr. Ahmed has been a consistent and enthusiastic supporter of our research. This book could not have been accomplished without the high-quality research environment he provides. We also thank Dr. Ingmar Weber, the leader of the Social Computing Group at QCRI. His steady hand at the wheel has provided the consistency needed for this book to come together. We also thank the other QCRI executives, Drs. Ashraf Aboulnaga and Mohamed F. Mokbel, for their positive support for the Team's research efforts. Good to have key leaders supporting what you do! It makes great things possible! We also thank our colleagues at QCRI, both past and present, for the wonderful work environment that only great people can provide!

Much of the research presented in the book could not, would not, have happened without the support of enthusiastic collaborators from industry and non-profits in Qatar, especially Haris Alisic (Head of Audience Development and Engagement at AJ+), Dianne Robillos (CRM Analysis Manager / Consumer Research and Insights Manager at Qatar Airways), and Ali Sikandar, Manager (Digital and Social Media, Qatar Foundation). They believe in what the Team is doing and the value of research-industry collaboration! We sincerely thank them for 'going out on a limb' in this collaboration. Here is to many more crazy .. and productive! ... ideas to come!

Some of the research in this book builds off of and reports research conducted with others in academia. We thank all of our collaborators, including Yisela Alvarez Trentini (independent researcher), Motahhare Eslami (Computer Science Department, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, IL, USA), Willemien Froneman (Africa Open Institute, Stellenbosch University, Stellenbosch, South Africa), Rohan Gurunandan Rao (Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Tamil Nadu, India), Ahmed Mohamed Sayed Kamel (Department of Clinical Pharmacy, Cairo University, Giza, Egypt), Ilkka Kaate (University of Turku, Turku, Finland), Aki Koponen (University of Turku, Turku, Finland), Ying-Hsang Liu (Department of Design, University of Southern Denmark), Lene Nielsen (IT University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark), João M. Santos (Centre for Psychological Research and Social Intervention (CIS), ISCTE-Instituto Universitário de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal), Sercan Şengün (Wonsook Kim College of Fine Arts, Illinois State University, Normal, IL, USA), and Jukka Vahlo (University of Tampere, Tampere, Finland). We enjoyed working with you, and we look forward to more opportunities to work together in the future!

We also thank Chris Chapman (Principal Quantitative UX Researcher, Google). Although we have never directly worked with Chris, we have found his disdain of personas especially motivating for our research! Thanks, Chris! Keep up the pressure!

Of course, we thank the publishing team, especially the ever professional but loads of fun, Diane Cerra (Executive Editor at Morgan & Claypool Publishers)! Diane has been great throughout this process! Thanks to Jack Carroll (Distinguished Professor of Information Sciences and Technology at Pennsylvania State University and Editor, Synthesis Lectures on Human-Centered Informatics at Morgan & Claypool). Jack was supportive of this book from the word ‘go’, and we thank him for his immediate and on-going support!
Finally, the world is a better place thanks to people who want to and actually do help and support others. It has certainly been our good fortune to be the beneficiaries of so much help from the people mentioned here. We thank them, and we thank everyone who strives to help and support others. We will pass it on.

Chapters for Data-Driven Personas, a Morgan-Claypool Publication https://persona.qcri.org/blog/chapters-for-data-driven-personas-a-morgan-claypool-publication/

Update – Data-Driven Personas Book for Sam, the system designer https://persona.qcri.org/blog/update-data-driven-personas-book-for-sam-the-system-designer/

Update Data-Driven Personas Book for Ting, the researcher https://persona.qcri.org/blog/update-data-driven-personas-books-for-ting/

Update – Data-Driven Personas book for Kristi, the professor https://persona.qcri.org/blog/update-data-driven-personas-book/

Personas for Book on Data-Driven Personas https://persona.qcri.org/blog/personas-for-book-on-data-driven-personas/

For our forthcoming book, “Data-Driven Personas”, one of the personas that we are designing the book’s content for is the computer science educator, Kristi.
We are keeping Kristi, the academic professor, in mind while designing the book.

1. The ~200 page book is organized into 10 coherent chapters, so it will fit nicely into an academic course schedule.
2. Each chapter ends with chapter take-aways (i.e., major points) and questions for discussions and reflections, so these will facilitate class interactions, projects, and exams.
3. The Morgan Claypool Lectures are available via many universities, so the students will not have to purchase the text; they can freely download from their university libraries, if subscribed.

Data-Driven Personas
by Bernard J. Jansen, Joni O. Salminen, Kathleen Guan, and Soon-Gyo Jung Hamad Bin Khalifa University (HBKU) and University College London. Synthesis Lectures on Human-Centered Informatics Morgan & Claypool Publishers