Table of Contents

Background

User participation and user feedback are essential to the suc￾cess of new product development (NPD). Development teams use user feedback to derive requirement engineering artifacts, such as user scenarios, user stories, concept mindmaps, and user personas, to guide them in identifying and addressing a particular user problem. However, finding enough user participation to collect meaningful feedback is challenging, and less attention has been given to addressing this.

Active Personas

Active Personas (APs), fictional users capable of generating contextual feedback through an interactive multi-modal interaction, such as text, voice, image, and video. APs enable development teams to gather feedback on their solutions through iterative internal experimentation. APs use generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) to enable dynamic multi-modal interaction and utilize user personas to generate contextual feedback.

Active Personas: core concept
Active Personas: core concept

User Personas

User personas are “hypothetical archetypes of actual users” developed iteratively through user research. It provides a descriptive model of real users to com￾plement human participation in NPD. This concept is often used in RE activities, solution design, and usability testing. For example, capturing user needs and designing user interfaces. A user persona commonly consists of user goals, motivations, pain points, personal characteristics, skills, experiences, environmental, and group characteristics that reflect the actual users. A development team can also use their assumption about the target users as a basis to create initial personas, i.e., proto-personas. User personas help the development team build empathy towards their users and understand the problems from the users’ perspective.

GenAI

As a subset of AI technology, GenAI can create novel human-like generated content in various modalities, including texts, images, audio, videos, and simulations. This technology lever￾ages advanced machine learning models to recognize patterns and relationships within a large dataset to generate responses to given inputs. Approaches, such as retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and fine-tuning, can feed user personas and other RE artifacts into GenAI.

Publications

  1. Mario Simaremare, Henry Edison, “Active Personas for Synthetic User Feedback: A Design Science Study”, 2025. (View)

  2. Mario Simaremare, Henry Edison, “Accelerating New Product Development: A Vision on Active Personas”, Software Business, ICSOB 2024, ISSN 1865-1348, EISSN 1865-1356, pp. 461-466, Springer Science+Business Media B.V., 2025 (View)

Roadmap

  1. AP conceptual validation (Jul 2024)
  2. Develop an APs prototype for conceptual and practical validation
    • Early prototype for concept viability (Aug 2025)
    • Web-based prototype for public use and evaluation (Nov 2025)
  3. Studies in controlled settings, e.g., open-source projects
  4. Studies in ongoing projects in various types and domains
    • Usability evaluation (using Nielsen’s heuristics) in transportation domain (Aug 2025)
  5. Evaluate the alignment between the internal & external experimentation

On Going Work

Making a Working Prototype Publicly Available (November 2025)

We are currently developing a web-based prototype of APs. The prototype is expected to be available for public use in November 2025.

Reach Us!

Interest to participate in the project? Please send us an email!