Auto-Generated Personas: Enhancing User-centered Design Practices among University Students
Xishuo Zhang, Lin Liu, Yì Xiáng J. Wáng, Xiao Liu, Huawen Wang, Chetan Arora, Haichao Liu, Weijia Wang, Thuong Hoang
Abstract
Personas are commonly used in User-centered Design (UCD) activities to help designers better understand users’ needs. However, there is still a reliance on traditional approaches such as interviews and ethnography for building personas in UCD activities. To this end, we developed an auto-generating persona system to enhance practices in UCD course activities. Our persona system is developed based on the GPT-4 model, the DALL-E 2 model, and knowledge graphs. Hence, our persona system includes three main features of our persona system: automated processing of survey data, automatic generation of 2D avatars, and providing options for automatic or customized entity generation. We recruited a total of 22 participants to evaluate our persona system. Our findings confirmed that there was a significant difference in terms of efficiency, satisfaction, accuracy, and diversity. Meanwhile, participants provided both positive and negative feedback regarding our persona system. As on-going work, we discuss the current limitations of our persona system and explore future research directions to further improve its capabilities and effectiveness.