Abstract: Persona is a common human-computerinteraction technique for increasing stakeholders’understanding of audiences, customers, or users.Applied in many domains, such as e-commerce, health,marketing, software development, and system design,personas have remained relatively unchanged for severaldecades. However, with the increasing popularity ofdigital user data and data science algorithms, there arenew opportunities to progressively shift personas fromgeneral representations of user segments to preciseinteractive tools for decision-making. In this vision,the persona profile functions as an interface to a fullyfunctional analytics system. With this research, weconceptually investigate how data-driven personas can beleveraged as analytics tools for understanding users. Wepresent a conceptual framework consisting of (a) personabenefits, (b) analytics benefits, and (c) decision-makingoutcomes. We apply this framework for an analysis ofdigital marketing use cases to demonstrate how datadrivenpersonas can be leveraged in practical situations.We then present a functional overview of an actual datadrivenpersona system that relies on the concept of dataaggregation in which the fundamental question definesthe unit of analysis for decision-making. The systemprovides several functionalities for stakeholders withinorganizations to address this question.

Keywords: persona, analytics, data-driven personas,data science, conceptual analysis