Here’s the reading list I recommend to “newcomers” in quantitative persona research (e.g., Master’s students, PhD candidates) (see bolded parts for explanations for why you should read each paper):
- Salminen, J., Guan, K., Jung, S.G., and Jansen, B. J. (2022) Use Cases for Design Personas: A Systematic Review and New Frontiers. 2022 ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI’22). 30 April – 6 May. New Orleans, USA. 21 pages. ==> read this to understand how personas can be used
- Guan, K. W., Salminen, J., Jung, S.-G., & Jansen, B. J. (2023). Leveraging Personas for Social Impact: A Review of Their Applications to Social Good in Design. International Journal of Human–Computer Interaction, 0(0), 1–16. ==> read this to understand how personas can be used for societally useful outcomes
- Jung, S.G., Salminen, J. and Jansen, B. J. (2022) Developing Persona Analytics Towards Persona Science. 27th Annual Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces. 22-25 March. Helsinki, Finland. p. 323-344. ==> read this to understand what persona science is and how it could be done through empirical research
- Salminen, J., Guan, K., Jung, S. G., and Jansen, B. J. (2021) A Survey of 15 Years of Data-Driven Persona Development, International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction. DOI: 10.1080/10447318.2021.1908670 ==> read this to understand the historical continuum of quantitative persona research
- Jansen, B. J., Salminen, J., & Jung, S. (2020). Data-Driven Personas for Enhanced User Understanding: Combining Empathy with Rationality for Better Insights to Analytics. Data and Information Management, 4(1), 1–17. https://doi.org/10.2478/dim-2020-0005. ==> read this to understand the basic logic behind persona systems
- Salminen, J., Santos, J. M., Kwak, H., An, J., Jung, S.G., and Jansen, B. J. (2020) Persona Perception Scale: Development and Exploratory Validation of an Instrument for Evaluating Individuals’ Perceptions of Personas. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, (141), Article 102437. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhcs.2020.102437. ==> read this to understand why user perceptions of personas matter and how they can be measured
- Salminen, J., Jung, S., Chowdhury, S. A., Sengün, S., & Jansen, B. J. (2020, April 25). Personas and Analytics: A Comparative User Study of Efficiency and Effectiveness for a User Identification Task. Proceedings of the ACM Conference of Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI’20). https://doi.org/10.1145/3313831.3376770. ==> read this to understand how interactive persona systems can be compared with other types of analytics systems
- Salminen, J., Kwak, H., An, J., Jung, S.G., and Jansen, B. J. (2018) Are personas done? Evaluating their usefulness in the age of digital analytics. Persona Studies. 4, 2, 47-65. ==> read this to understand the limitations of personas in analytics use cases
- An, J., Kwak, H., Salminen, J., Jung, S.G., and Jansen, B. J. (2018) Imaginary People Representing Real Numbers: Generating Personas from Online Social Media Data. ACM Transactions on the Web. 12, 4, Article 27. ==> read this to understand how clustering/segmentation/data dimensionality reduction algorithms can be applied to persona generation
More persona research can be found at the persona research page. PDF versions of the articles are available from me upon request: Dr. Joni Salminen, email: [email protected].