Creating persona's with the Reworc Persona Synthesizer

Introduction

The Persona we discuss here, is the concept as it is used in User Experience design, as defined by Alan Cooper.  

Sometimes it is desired to not only segment groups of users into existing demographic details such as Team or Function, but also create groups based on similar behavioral characteristics such as mobility or type of activity pattern. For this reason, Reworcs "Persona Synthesizer" was created. The persona synthesizer can automatically synthesize unique personas from all workprofiles, helped by machine learning in the platform. 

How to use the Persona Synthesizer

When the WorkNavigator dashboard is being used for the analysis of workstyles, an administrator accesses the "WorkNavigator Manager" to run the Persona Synthesizer: 

1. You can access the WorkNavigator Manager in the top-right corner of the WorkNavigator dashboard. 

2. Select the population you want to use and expand the "People and Attributes" panel. Scroll down until you see the 'New Persona Synth Attribute'.  Using the persona synthesizer will create a new attribute that will contain similar work styles. 

3. By clicking the "Create Persona Synth Attribute" button the Persona Synthesizer is opened. A name for the attribute must be entered and an optional Prefix string can be entered that will be prefixed to each of the generated persona's (groups of similar work styles).

Then the user provides the minimum and a maximum number of personas. The synthesizer will create the number of personas within this range that provides the most distinguishable results. 

4. Lastly, the work style dimensions that should be used in the analysis and synthesis of personas should be selected. In theory, any of the Dimensions and sub-dimensions can be used, but the results may be hard to interpret if more than 3 to 5 dimensions are used.

5. By clicking the "Save and Close" button the Persona Synthesizer will be started and the panel will be closed. After a few seconds the new Persona based attribute will be created. This attribute can be found in the WorkNavigator attributes menu on the right side. After this, the individual attribute values can be used in the WorkNavigator dashboard (grouping, filtering, reporting and scenario modelling) and can also be managed (renamed, reordered) in the WorkNavigator Manager.

What does the Persona Synthesizer do?

In simple terms, the Persona Synthesizer is smart technology that can compare and group numerous work profiles in your analysis on similar characteristics that you can configure in the WorkNavigator Manager. It uses computing power and an algorithm to do this faster and more accurate than any human could do. For a more in-depth explanation you can read the paragraph below. 

The persona synthesizer is a customized and proprietary algorithm from Reworc, that performs a series of Machine learning algorithms. It is a method of vector quantization, originally from signal processing, that aims to partition n observations (workstyle attribute value) into k clusters (personas) in which each observation belongs to the cluster with the nearest mean (cluster centers or cluster centroid), serving as a prototype of the cluster. This results in a partitioning of the data space into Voronoi cells. The Persona Synthesizer algorithm minimizes within-cluster variances (squared Euclidean distances), but not regular Euclidean distances. The problem is intrinsically computationally difficult (NP-hard); however, the efficient heuristic algorithms of the Persona Synthesizer converge quickly to a local optimum. The Persona Synthesizer is an unsupervised algorithm which is calibrated to find the optimum number of work style cohorts in typical applications of the Reworc software.