The Ability of Personas: An Empirical Evaluation of Altering Incorrect Preconceptions About Users

False preconceptions about users can result in poor design, product development, and marketing decisions, so rectifying these preconceptions is essential for organizations. This research quantitatively evaluates the ability of data-driven personas to alter decision makers’ preconceptions about their online social media users. We conduct a within-participant experiment of 31 professionals carrying out a workplace task … Read more

Toxic Text in Personas: An Experiment on User Perceptions

When algorithms create personas from social media data, the personas can become noxious via automatically including toxic comments. To investigate how users perceive such personas, we conducted a 2 × 2 user experiment with 496 participants that showed participants toxic and non-toxic versions of data-driven personas. We found that participants gave higher credibility, likability, empathy, … Read more

Which Message? Which Channel? Which Customer?: Exploring Response Rates in Multi-Channel Marketing Using Short Form Advertising

Formulating short form advertising messages with little ad content that work and choosing high-performing channels to disseminate them are persistent challenges in multichannel marketing. Drawing on the persuasive systems design model, we conducted an experiment with 33,848 actual customers of an international telecom company. In a real-life setting, we compared the effectiveness of three persuasion … Read more

Using Artificially Generated Pictures in Customer-facing Systems: An Evaluation Study with Data-Driven Personas

We conduct two studies to evaluate the suitability of artificially generated facial pictures for use in a customer-facing system using data-driven personas. STUDY 1 investigates the quality of a sample of 1,000 artificially generated facial pictures. Obtaining 6,812 crowd judgments, we find that 90% of the images are rated medium quality or better. STUDY 2 … Read more

Can Unhappy Pictures Enhance the Effect of Personas? A User Experiment

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 … Read more