This document outlines a research roadmap for automatically generating personas by addressing key challenges including choosing the correct information elements and layouts for different users and use cases, finding representative quotes, evaluating completeness and credibility of personas, inferring user attributes from data, analyzing changes over time, selecting profile images, and applying personas in different contexts such as e-commerce, politics, and gaming. The goal is to process vast online data to better represent users.

1. Research Roadmap for Automatic
Persona Generation
Information architecture:
How to choose the correct
information elements and
layouts for a given user, use
case or industry?
Quotes:
How to find representative,
contextually relevant,
and non-distracting
comments describing the
persona?
Evaluation: 1) How to ensure
personas are complete, clear,
consistent and credible?
2) How to measure usefulness
of personas for individuals and
organizations?
Attributes: How to infer
user attributes, such as
psychographics, needs
and wants, political
orientation, and brand
affinities?
Temporal analysis:
How to analyze change
and stability of personas
over time?
Image: How to retrieve,
generate, and choose
persona profile pictures?
Finding better ways to process and choose useful user
information from vast amounts of online data.
”Personas are about giving faces to data.” – Jim Jansen
Applicability: How to create
personas for different
contexts (e.g., e-commerce
personas, political personas,
gamer personas…)?