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Cited by 97Persona Design and ApplicationsBig Data and Business IntelligenceData Visualization and Analytics

Data-Driven Personas for Enhanced User Understanding: Combining Empathy with Rationality for Better Insights to Analytics

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Jansen, Bernard J., Salminen, Joni O., Jung, Soon-Gyo·2020·Data and Information Management
DOI 10.2478/dim-2020-0005
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Abstract

Persona is a common human-computer interaction technique for increasing stakeholders’ understanding of audiences, customers, or users. Applied in many domains, such as e-commerce, health, marketing, software development, and system design, personas have remained relatively unchanged for several decades. However, with the increasing popularity of digital user data and data science algorithms, there are new opportunities to progressively shift personas from general representations of user segments to precise interactive tools for decision-making. In this vision, the persona profile functions as an interface to a fully functional analytics system. With this research, we conceptually investigate how data-driven personas can be leveraged as analytics tools for understanding users. We present a conceptual framework consisting of (a) persona benefits, (b) analytics benefits, and (c) decision-making outcomes. We apply this framework for an analysis of digital marketing use cases to demonstrate how data-driven personas can be leveraged in practical situations. We then present a functional overview of an actual data-driven persona system that relies on the concept of data aggregation in which the fundamental question defines the unit of analysis for decision-making. The system provides several functionalities for stakeholders within organizations to address this question.

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  • Companies incorporating usability engineering early in the development cycle experienced faster time to market and higher customer satisfaction, resulting in a significant increase in ROI.

    “Similarly, a cross-industry analysis by Jansen et al., (2020) found that companies incorporating usability engineering early in the development cycle experienced faster time to market and higher customer satisfaction, resulting in a significant increase in ROI.”

    From A Systematic Literature Review of User-Centric Design in Digital Business Systems Enhancing Accessibility, Adoption, and Organizational Impact (2023) · cites this paper as Jansen et al., (2020)

    The Introduction and the section labelled “Expensive Affordable” discuss data-driven personas and customer-oriented decision-making, not a cross-industry analysis of companies adopting usability engineering early. Searches for “usability engineering,” “time to market,” “customer satisfaction,” and “ROI” found no passage reporting the claimed outcomes or increase in ROI; page numbers were not available in our copy. (LLM, conf=0.76)

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Research works printed but not linked: 65

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Cited by

Sorted by citations

Authors
Jansen, B. J., Salminen, J. O., & Jung, S.-G.
Affiliations
Hamad bin Khalifa University (QA)
Corresponding author
Jansen, Bernard J.
ORCID
Venue
Data and Information Management
Publisher
Elsevier BV
Published
2020-03
Volume
4
Issue
1
Pages
1-17
ISSN
2543-9251 (ISSN-L)
DOI
10.2478/dim-2020-0005
OpenAlex
W3015410015
Cited by
97
References
5
Citations by year
2026: 14 · 2025: 22 · 2024: 10 · 2023: 10 · 2022: 13 · 2021: 24 · 2020: 4
FWCI
9.29
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Licence
Locations
  • Data and Information Management (publishedVersion, cc-by-nc-nd)
  • UTUPub (University of Turku) (submittedVersion)
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Human-Computer Interaction › Persona Design and Applications
  • Social Sciences › Business, Management and Accounting › Management Information Systems › Big Data and Business Intelligence
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Data Visualization and Analytics
Keywords
personas, user understanding, data analysis software, decision-making, digital marketing, data aggregation, customer segmentation, conceptual framework, stakeholder awareness

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