Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-xtgtn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-23T09:31:02.530Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Personification of Big Data

Part of: User-Centred Design

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 July 2019

Phillip Douglas Stevenson  and
Christopher Andrew Mattson

Abstract

Core share and HTML view are not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

Organizations all over the world, both national and international, gather demographic data so that the progress of nations and peoples can be tracked. This data is often made available to the public in the form of aggregated national level data or individual responses (microdata). Product designers likewise conduct surveys to better understand their customer and create personas. Personas are archetypes of the individuals who will use, maintain, sell or otherwise be affected by the products created by designers. Personas help designers better understand the person the product is designed for. Unfortunately, the process of collecting customer information and creating personas is often a slow and expensive process. In this paper, we introduce a new method of creating personas, leveraging publicly available databanks of both aggregated national level and information on individuals in the population. A computational persona generator is introduced that creates a population of personas that mirrors a real population in terms of size and statistics. Realistic individual personas are filtered from this population for use in product development.

Keywords

PersonaPersona GeneratorUser centred designBig dataDesign methods
Type
Article
Information
Proceedings of the Design Society: International Conference on Engineering Design , Volume 1 , Issue 1 , July 2019 , pp. 4019 - 4028
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
© The Author(s) 2019

References

Chapman, C. N. and Milham, R. P. (2006), “The personas’ new clothes: methodological and practical arguments against a popular method”, in ‘Proceedings of the human factors and ergonomics society annual meeting”, Vol. 50, SAGE Publications Sage CA: Los Angeles, CA, pp. 634–636. https://doi.org/10.1177/154193120605000503Google Scholar
Cooper, A. (2004a), The inmates are running the asylum:[Why high-tech products drive us crazy and how to restore the sanity], Sams Indianapolis.Google Scholar
Cooper, A. (2004b), “The origin of personas”, INNOVATION-MCLEAN THEN DULLES VIRGINIA, Vol. 23 No. 1, pp. 26–29.Google Scholar
Griggs, D., Stafford-Smith, M., Gaffney, O., Rockström, J., Öhman, M. C., Shyamsundar, P., Steffen, W., Glaser, G., Kanie, N. and Noble, I. (2013), ‘Policy: Sustainable development goals for people and planet’, Nature 495(7441), 305. https://doi.org/10.1038/495305aGoogle Scholar
Hanington, B. and Martin, B. (2012), Universal methods of design: 100 ways to research complex problems, develop innovative ideas, and design effective solutions, Rockport Publishers.Google Scholar
Fund, International Monetary (2005), Global Financial Stability Report September 2005: Market Developments and Issues, International Monetary Fund.Google Scholar
Jung, S.-G., An, J., Kwak, H., Ahmad, M., Nielsen, L. and Jansen, B. J. (2017), “Persona generation from aggregated social media data, in ‘Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems”, ACM, pp. 1748–1755. https://doi.org/10.1145/3027063.3053120Google Scholar
Jung, S.G., Salminen, J., Kwak, H., An, J., and Jansen, B. J. (2018), “Automatic Persona Generation (APG): A Rationale and Demonstration, in ‘Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Human Information Interaction&Retrieval’, ACM, pp. 321–324. https://doi.org/10.1145/3176349.3176893Google Scholar
Mattson, C. A. and Sorensen, C. D. (2015), “Fundamentals of Product Development, Brigham Young University.Google Scholar
Mikkelson, N. and Lee, W. O. (2000), Incorporating user archetypes into scenario-based design, in Proc. UPA.Google Scholar
Minnesota Population Center (2018), Integrated Public Use Microdata Series, International: Version 7.1 [dataset], Technical report IPUMS, Minneapolis MN. https://doi.org/10.18128/D020.V7.1Google Scholar
Moore, G. A. and McKenna, R. (1999), ‘Crossing the chasm’.Google Scholar
Pruitt, J. and Adlin, T. (2010), “The persona lifecycle: keeping people in mind throughout product design, Elsevier.Google Scholar
Pruitt, J. and Grudin, J. (2003), Personas: practice and theory, in ‘Proceedings of the 2003 conference on Designing for user experiences’, ACM, pp. 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1145/997078.997089Google Scholar
Sichieri, R., Coitinho, D. C., Leao, M. M., Recine, E. and Everhart, J. E. (1994), “High temporal, geographic, and income variation in body mass index among adults in Brazil”, American Journal of Public Health 84(5), 793–798. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.84.5.793Google Scholar
Sinha, R. (2003), “Persona development for information-rich domains, in ‘CHI'03 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems”, ACM, pp. 830–831. https://doi.org/10.1145/766011.766017Google Scholar
Stevenson, P. D., Mattson, C. A., Bryden, K. M. and MacCarty, N. A. (2018), “Toward a Universal Social Impact Metric for Engineered Products That Alleviate Poverty”, Journal of Mechanical Engineering, Vol. 140, No. 4, pp. 41404-1–41404-10. https://doi.org/10.1115/1.4038925Google Scholar
Tahir, M. F. (1997), “Who's on the other side of your software: Creating user profiles through contextual inquiry”, in Proc. UPA'97. https://doi.org/10.5120/ijca2017914504Google Scholar
The World Bank (2016), World Development Indicators 2016”, Technical report.Google Scholar
UNICEF (2017), “Drinking water, sanitation and hygiene database, Technical report”, UNICEF. URL: https://data.unicef.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Drinking-Water-Sanitation-Hygiene-Database-July-2017.xlsxGoogle Scholar
United Nations. Dept. of International Economic and Social Affairs (1982), World Population Prospects, UN.Google Scholar
U.S. Central Intellegence Agency (2010), “The World Factbook’, See also:https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook .Google Scholar
Van Boeijen, A., Daalhuizen, J., van der Schoor, R. and Zijlstra, J. (2014), “Delft design guide: Design strategies and methods”, BIS Publishers.Google Scholar
Weinstein, A. and Winston, W. (2016), “Defining your market: winning strategies for high-tech, industrial, and service firms”, Routledge.Google Scholar
World Bank Group (2014), “World development indicators 2014”, World Bank Publications.Google Scholar