Stakeholders like designers use personas to learn about users. After persona development, stakeholders are usually presented with a persona set. However, there is little research on how stakeholders select a persona from a persona set. A think-aloud analysis with 37 stakeholders who were asked to select a persona for a content design task reveals that persona selection is influenced by comparative, non-comparative, and subjective elements. Persona choice is often made with task compatibility in mind: interests, professions, and education were important contextual factors in our focal task. Storifying is commonly applied by stakeholders, reflecting personas’ narrative nature. The persona’s picture is often evoked, in addition to nationality and name, though demographics do not play a decisive role. Stakeholders refer to a host of persona attributes when explicating their persona choice. Overall, reasonings for persona choice are multifaceted and individualistic, as we might expect given the information-richness of personas.

Virtual reality (VR) roleplaying games designed to promote perspective taking typically involve players assuming the perspective of others from different backgrounds and experiencing a simulated scenario from their everyday life, with the goal of facilitating and enhancing empathy and social acceptance toward marginalized groups.One key question pertains to the extent to which players' perspective during VR roleplaying games affects their social acceptance of the other.To address this question, we examined the effect of first-person vs. third-person perspective on presence, co-presence, and social acceptance during a VR roleplaying game.Two groups of participants played the same VR roleplaying game from either a first-person perspective or a third-person perspective.Results showed that compared to third-person perspective, firstperson perspective led to greater co-presence during the game and engendered higher levels of social acceptance toward the character whose role participants played.These results highlight the importance of using first-person perspective in VR roleplaying games focusing on facilitating and enhancing social acceptance. CCS Concepts• Human

In this study, we explored the effect of seeing one’s avatar in a virtual mirror during a virtual reality (VR) perspective taking experience. Participants were divided into two groups, with one experiencing the VR environment with the presence of a mirror showcasing their avatar and the other without. Results revealed that the sense of presence was comparable across both groups. However, a notable difference emerged in terms of empathy; participants who viewed their avatars in the mirror exhibited reduced empathic responses. These findings illuminate the nuanced dynamics of self-representation in virtual environments, suggesting that inducing self-awareness through a virtual mirror in VR might have unintended emotional consequences.

Studies in human-computer interaction recommend creating fewer than ten personas, based on stakeholders’ limitations to cognitively process and use personas. However, no existing studies offer empirical support for having fewer rather than more personas. Investigating this matter, thirty-seven participants interacted with five and fifteen personas using an interactive persona system, choosing one persona to design for. Our study results from eye-tracking and survey data suggest that when using interactive persona systems, the number of personas can be increased from the conventionally suggested ‘less than ten’, without significant negative effects on user perceptions or task performance, and with the positive effects of increasing engagement with the personas, having a more diverse representation of the end-user population, as well as users accessing personas from more varied demographic groups for a design task. Using the interactive persona system, users adjusted their information processing style by spending less time on each persona when presented with fifteen personas, while still absorbing a similar amount of information than with five personas, implying that more efficient information processing strategies are applied with more personas. The results highlight the importance of designing interactive persona systems to support users’ browsing of more personas.

There has been little research into whether a persona's picture should portray a happy or unhappy individual. We report a user experiment with 235 participants, testing the effects of happy and unhappy image styles on user perceptions, engagement, and personality traits attributed to personas using a mixed-methods analysis. Results indicate that the participant's perceptions of the persona's realism and pain point severity increase with the use of unhappy pictures. In contrast, personas with happy pictures are perceived as more extroverted, agreeable, open, conscientious, and emotionally stable. The participants’ proposed design ideas for the personas scored more lexical empathy scores for happy personas. There were also significant perception changes along with the gender and ethnic lines regarding both empathy and perceptions of pain points. Implications are the facial expression in the persona profile can affect the perceptions of those employing the personas. Therefore, persona designers should align facial expressions with the task for which the personas will be employed. Generally, unhappy images emphasize realism and pain point severity, and happy images invoke positive perceptions.

Personas are a well-known technique in human computer interaction. However, there is a lack of rigorous empirical research evaluating personas relative to other methods. In this 34-participant experiment, we compare a persona system and an analytics system, both using identical user data, for efficiency and effectiveness for a user identification task. Results show that personas afford faster task completion than the analytics system, as well as outperforming analytics with significantly higher user identification accuracy. Qualitative analysis of think-aloud transcripts shows that personas have other benefits regarding learnability and consistency. However, the analytics system affords insights and capabilities that personas cannot due to inherent design differences. Findings support the use of personas to learn about users, empirically confirming some of the stated benefits in the literature, while also highlighting the limitations of personas that may necessitate the use of accompanying methods.

In an experiment, we present 38 marketing and data analysts professionals with two online AI-driven persona interfaces, one using numbers and the other using text. We employ eye tracking, think-aloud, and a post-engagement survey for data collection to measure perception and visual engagement with the personas along 7 constructs. Results show that the use of numbers has a mixed effect on the perceptions and visual engagement of the persona profile, with job role as a determining factor on whether numbers/text affect end users for 2 of the constructs. The use of numbers has a significant positive effect on user perceptions of usefulness by analysts but a significantly negative effect on user perceptions of completeness for both marketers and analysts. The use of numbers decreases the perceived completeness of the personas for both marketer and analysts. This research has both theoretical and practical consequences for AI-driven persona development and their interface design, suggesting that the inclusion of numbers can have a desirable effect for certain roles but with possible negative effects on user perceptions.

Increased access to data and computational techniques enable innovations in the space of automated customer analytics, for example, automatic persona generation. Automatic persona generation is the process of creating data-driven representations from user or customer statistics. Even though automatic persona generation is technically possible and provides advantages compared to manual persona creation regarding the speed and freshness of the personas, it is not clear (a) what information to include in the persona profiles and (b) how to display that information. To query into these aspects relating information design of personas, we conducted a user study with 38 participants. In the findings, we report several challenges relating to the design of automatically generated persona profiles, including usability issues, perceptual issues, and issues relating to information content. Our research has implications for the information design of data-driven personas.

Since virtual identities such as social media profiles and avatars have become a common venue for self-expression, it has become important to consider the ways in which existing systems embed the values of their designers. In order to design virtual identity systems that reflect the needs and preferences of diverse users, understanding how the virtual identity construction differs between groups is important. This paper presents a new methodology that leverages deep learning and differential clustering for comparative analysis of profile images, with a case study of almost 100 000 avatars from a large online community using a popular avatar creation platform. We use novelty discovery to segment the avatars, then cluster avatars by region to identify visual trends among low-and high-novelty avatars. We find that avatar customization correlates with increased social activity, and we are able to identify distinct visual trends among the U.S.-region and Japan-region profiles. Among these trends, realistic, idealistic, and creative self-representation can be distinguished. We observe that the realistic self-expression mirrors regional demographics, idealistic self-expression reflects shared mass-media tropes, and creative self-expression propagates within the communities.

In deploying social media and other information technologies often not designed with MENA (the Middle East and North Africa) cultures in mind, users generate creative approaches to self-representation using virtual identities while preserving their cultural values. To understand and further empower such approaches, we present a mixed-method of computational and qualitative study, focusing on Qatar as a case of such communities in the MENA region. We analyzed a dataset of over 42,000 publicly available social media profiles using computational approaches (archetypal analysis) and qualitatively analyzed a separate set of 255 profiles. We augmented our descriptions with semi-structured interviews. As a result, we delineate a set of five needs/values exhibited by Qatari users supporting their creativity in effectively using virtual identities: Khaleeji features, self-expression, social connections, social monitoring, and physical and virtual identity contrasts. Finally, we propose an initial set of guidelines to support developers of virtual identity systems in better serving these users while preserving their cultural values and creative agency.