Auto-generated personas: Enhancing user-centered design practices among university students

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.