Persona Transparency: Analyzing the Impact of Explanations on Perceptions of Data-Driven Personas

Abstract

Computational techniques are becoming more common in persona development. However, users of personas may question the information in persona profiles because they are unsure of how it was created. This problem is especially vexing for data-driven personas because their creation is an opaque algorithmic process. In this research, we analyze the effect of increased transparencyi.e., explanations of how the information in data-driven personas was producedon user perceptions. We find that higher transparency through these explanations increases the perceived completeness and clarity of the personas. Contrary to our hypothesis, the perceived credibility of the personas decreases with the increased transparency, possibly due to the technical complexity of the persona profiles disrupting the facade of the personas being real people. This finding suggests that explaining the algorithmic process of data-driven persona creation involves a "transparency trade-off". We also find that the gender of the persona affects the perceptions, with transparency increasing perceived completeness and empathy of the female persona, but not for the male persona. Therefore, transparency may specifically assist in the acceptance of female personas. We provide practical implication for persona creators regarding transparency in persona profiles.

Persona preparedness: a survey instrument for measuring the organizational readiness for deploying personas

“…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: Minimum Age: 23, Maximum Age: 62 (inclusive)—the purpose was to focus on those in active work life United Kingdom, United States, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand—the purpose was to focus on predominantly English-speaking countries to avoid misunderstanding of the questions Student Status: No—the purpose was to focus on those in active work life Excluding self-employed individuals—the purpose was to focus on people working in organizations larger than one person Employment status: Full-time—the purpose was to focus on people actively engaging in work life on a full-time basis Organizational tenure: excluding those with less than five months—the purpose was to focus on people that have an adequate understanding of their organization; hence a minimum tenure was required.…”

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“…Initially developed by Cooper (1999) as user personas for software development, teams within Microsoft extended the application and set out foundations which find their application until today (Pruitt and Grudin, 2003). User personas have been extended in various ways, for examples towards future or anti personas (Fergnani, 2019, Fergnani andJackson, 2019;Fuglerud et al, 2020;Miaskiewicz and Kozar 2011;and Salminen et al, 2020). They can be developed in various ways depending on available information, resources and requirements profiles.…”

Data-Assisted Persona Construction Using Social Media Data

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