"She was useful, but a bit too optimistic": Augmenting Design with Interactive Virtual Personas

TL;DR

This paper explores the use of AI-driven interactive virtual personas to enhance user research and design processes, highlighting benefits, limitations, and ethical considerations based on a qualitative study with UX designers.

Contribution

It introduces Interactive Virtual Personas powered by LLMs, demonstrating their application in design activities and discussing strategies for effective, responsible integration into workflows.

Findings

IVPs expedite information gathering and inspire solutions

Designers see IVPs as a helpful supplement, not a replacement

Concerns include biases, over-optimism, and authenticity challenges

Abstract

Personas have been widely used to understand and communicate user needs in human-centred design. Despite their utility, they may fail to meet the demands of iterative workflows due to their static nature, limited engagement, and inability to adapt to evolving design needs. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) pave the way for more engaging and adaptive approaches to user representation. This paper introduces Interactive Virtual Personas (IVPs): multimodal, LLM-driven, conversational user simulations that designers can interview, brainstorm with, and gather feedback from in real time via voice interface. We conducted a qualitative study with eight professional UX designers, employing an IVP named "Alice" across three design activities: user research, ideation, and prototype evaluation. Our findings demonstrate the potential of IVPs to expedite information gathering, inspire design solutions, and provide rapid user-like feedback. However, designers raised concerns about biases, over-optimism, the challenge of ensuring authenticity without real stakeholder input, and the inability of the IVP to fully replicate the nuances of human interaction. Our participants emphasised that IVPs should be viewed as a complement to, not a replacement for, real user engagement. We discuss strategies for prompt engineering, human-in-the-loop integration, and ethical considerations for effective and responsible IVP use in design. Finally, our work contributes to the growing body of research on generative AI in the design process by providing insights into UX designers' experiences of LLM-powered interactive personas.