Developing Persona Analytics Towards Persona Science

Abstract

Much of the reported work on personas suffers from the lack of empirical evidence. To address this issue, we introduce Persona Analytics (PA), a system that tracks how users interact with data-driven personas. PA captures users’ mouse and gaze behavior to measure users’ interaction with algorithmically generated personas and use of system features for an interactive persona system. Measuring these activities grants an understanding of the behaviors of a persona user, required for quantitative measurement of persona use to obtain scientifically valid evidence. Conducting a study with 144 participants, we demonstrate how PA can be deployed for remote user studies during exceptional times when physical user studies are difficult, if not impossible.