Constructing Data-Driven Personas through an Analysis of Mobile Application Store Data

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 Earlier, designers focused on traditional qualitative personas but have been criticised for the lack of evidence and outdated results.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.