Anthropological User Research: A Data-Driven Approach to Personas Development

Abstract

In user experience design process, personas development is an expensive endeavor, which often involves allocating resources in an organization for a prolonged period. Design teams working under practical constraints demand increasingly a practical personas development approach. This study presents a novel data-driven personas development method with its root in anthropological research methods of frame elicitation and multidimensional scaling (MDS) analysis. In this paper, we discuss the merits and potential improvements to this new approach with a case study to illustrate its application in a multinational software company.