Introducing VR personas: an immersive and easy-to-use tool for understanding users

Personas have been established as an indispensable tool in software and product development. They continuously accompany the development process and seek to build empathy and establish an emotional relationship between developers and users. However, this does not always succeed, with the reasons for failure often lying in the personas themselves. If they do not have a sufficient level of detail or do not reflect everyday people, they lose credibility and therefore their purpose of representing the user. Poor communication of personas is another reason they are quickly forgotten. In this paper, we present a new approach to experiencing personas beyond traditional means such as posters or slides. With the help of virtual reality, we create immersive, three-dimensional personas that can be visited in their own living room. The basis of the implementation is a comprehensive dataset, containing aggregated data from over 8000 detailed face-to-face interviews. We base the layout of the apartment, the furniture, and the characters themselves on the archetypal characteristics of their corresponding user group. In the future, we plan to validate whether this approach can be successful in creating a deeper and more sustainable connection between personas and developers and designers. © 2023 the author(s), published by De Gruyter.