Who are your users? comparing media professionals' preconception of users to data-driven personas

• Main Authors: NIELSEN, Lene, JUNG, Soon-Gyu, AN, Jisun, SALMINEN, Joni, KWAK, Haewoon, JANSEN, Bernard J.
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2017
• Subjects: User experience; Automation; Journalism; Personas; Automotive Engineering; Databases and Information Systems
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/5340; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/6344/viewcontent/who_are_ur_users___PV.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

One of the reasons for using personas is to align user understandings across project teams and sites. As part of a larger persona study, at Al Jazeera English (AJE), we conducted 16 qualitative interviews with media producers, the end users of persona descriptions. We asked the participants about their understanding of a typical AJE media consumer, and the variety of answers shows that the understandings are not aligned and are built on a mix of own experiences, own self, assumptions, and data given by the company. The answers are sometimes aligned with the data-driven personas and sometimes not. The end users are divided in two groups: news producers who have little interest in having data-based insights of news consumers and producers for social media platforms who have more interest in this information.