Invoking the User from Data to Design

Personas, stemming from the field of user-centered design (UCD), are hypothetical users that represent the behaviors, goals, and values of actual users. This study describes the creation of personas in an academic library. With the goal of leveraging service-generated data, the authors coded a sample of chat reference transcripts, producing two numeric values for each. The transcripts were plotted on an X/Y graph where X represented the nature of the user's information need and Y represented the nature of the user's motivation. A k-means cluster analysis of the plotted points produced four clusters, which served as the personas' basis.