Data-Driven Persona Creation, Validation, and Evolution

[Context and motivation] Personas are a well-known technique to represent a particular user type and stimulate software development. [Question/problem] Personas are often based on findings from ethnographic studies, and their creation can be time and effort intensive. Furthermore, validating the correctness of the Personas is an open issue. [Principal ideas/results] We advocate a data-driven approach that relies on analyzing various kinds of user data, in particular, user feedback and monitoring data, to create, validate, and evolve Personas. [Contributions] In this research preview paper, we discuss the problem we want to address with our research, formulate research questions, describe the initial technical solution, and present our planned contributions through a fictional usage scenario. Furthermore, we provide initial research results from an ongoing interview study that analyzes the use of Personas in practice.