Citation: Park, D.; Kang, J.
Constructing Data-Driven Personas
through an Analysis of Mobile
Application Store Data. Appl. Sci.
2022, 12, 2869. https://doi.org/
10.3390/app12062869
Academic Editor: Enrico Vezzetti
Received: 14 February 2022
Accepted: 9 March 2022
Published: 10 March 2022
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Article
Constructing Data-Driven Personas through an Analysis of
Mobile Application Store Data
Daehee Park
1
and Jeannie Kang
2,
*
1
Samsung Research, Seoul 06765, Korea; daehee0.park@samsung.com
2
College of Art & Design, Ewha Womans University, Seoul 03760, Korea
* Correspondence: herenow.kang@ewha.ac.kr; Tel.: +82-1089032041
Abstract:
As smartphone segments have become more complex in recent times, the importance
of personas for designing and marketing has increased. Earlier, designers focused on traditional
qualitative personas but have been criticised for the lack of evidence and outdated results. However,
although several methods of quantitative persona creation have been developed over the last few
years, the use of mobile application store data has not yet been studied. In this research, we propose
a framework using work domain analysis to help designers and marketers to build personas easily
from mobile phone application store data. We considered the top 100 applications, which were
ranked based on the number of devices using each application, how often each application was used,
and the usage time. After proposing a new framework, we analysed data from a mobile application
store in January and August 2020. We then created quantitative personas based on the data and
discussed with experts whether the created personas successfully reflected real changes in mobile
application trends.
Keywords: personas; HCI; data-driven UX; quantitative persona; mobile phone application store
1. Introduction
As smartphone segments have become more complex in recent times, the importance
of personas is increasing [
1
–
5
]. Smartphones are increasingly ubiquitous, and many users
use multiple mobile devices to accommodate work, personal and geographic mobility
needs [
6
,
7
]. The term “personas” was first introduced by Cooper [
8
] to depict a new way
of generating user profiles. Cooper stated, “personas are not real people
. . .
they are
hypothetical archetypes of actual users
. . .
defined with significant rigor and precision” [
9
].
In other words, personas are regarded as imaginary people constructed to stand in as
concrete target users for products [
10
–
13
]. Personas are essential for the user-centred design
process [
10
,
14
–
16
], as they describe representations of segments of actual users presented
as a single imaginary person [
13
,
17
]. Pruitt and Grudin suggested that personas serve as a
conduit for including a broad range of qualitative and quantitative data and concentrate on
aspects of design and usage that other methods do not [
2
,
18
]. In general, the artefact is a
persona description implying attributes of the user segment that the fictionalised person
represents [
17
,
19
]. In order to comprehend a user’s workflow by scrutinising that user’s
behaviour, goals, needs, wants and frustrations [
20
], personas are an important starting
point to design the product, system and service. Traditionally, personas could be built
based on insights from user research. The designer carefully considered market insights
and the concept of the product to be developed; then, they created an image representative
of the users.
Although personas are important for designing and marketing to target users, persona
generation faces some issues because it still relies on traditional qualitative methods. Even
though the traditional method of building personas has been widely and popularly used
for a long time, there are several concerns.
Appl. Sci. 2022, 12, 2869. https://doi.org/10.3390/app12062869 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/applsci
