Here’s the reading list I recommend to “newcomers” in quantitative persona research (e.g., Master’s students, PhD candidates):
- 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 about persona use cases
- 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
- 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 how user perceptions of personas 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 version are available from the researchers upon request: Dr. Joni Salminen, email: [email protected].