User persona
Also called persona, AI persona
A user persona is a profile of a type of person a product serves: who they are, what they are trying to do, what they know already and what gets in their way.
Personas started as a design tool, a way to keep a team arguing about a specific person rather than an average one. The useful ones are specific about goals, context and constraints, and say little about hobbies.
Given to an AI agent, a persona becomes instructions. The detail that matters is the detail that changes behaviour: the device, the locale, how much patience they have, and what they already know about the product.
Where Stunt Double fits
Every actor is a persona you can run. You set the instructions and knowledge (including test credentials), and the actor uses them when it works through your product.
Related terms
- Synthetic usersSynthetic users are AI agents given a persona (a background, goals and constraints) that stand in for real users in research or testing.
- AI user testingAI user testing sends AI agents with defined personas through a product in place of recruited participants, and reports what each one did and where it got stuck.
- Synthetic researchSynthetic research is user research run with AI participants instead of recruited people: interviews, usability tasks and studies where the participants are personas played by AI agents.