Instilling Knowledge Claims of Personas from 346 Research Articles
Joni O. Salminen, Soon‐gyo Jung, Kamal Chhirang, Bernard J. Jim Jansen · 2021
Our research goal is to summarize the body of persona knowledge by identifying knowledge claims. This can aid HCI researchers to (a) navigate persona knowledge to form an understanding of what is known about personas quickly, (b) identify central research gaps of what is not known (or said) about personas, and (c) identify claims that are not substantiated with strong empirical evidence and warrant future work. To this end, we use computational and manual techniques to extract 130 knowledge claims based on 9139 sentences from 346 persona articles and analyze whether the existing literature supports these claims. The results, clustered into four groups (“Definition”, “Creation”, “Evaluation”, and “Use”), indicate that claims regarding persona definition are characterized by a higher degree of consensus. In contrast, persona creation and use contain a high proportion of unverified claims. There are few claims concerning evaluation. Empirical research should address unverified claims and develop the ontological understanding on persona evaluation.