Vivid-persona: customizable persona tool with interactive and immersive experiences

In the design field, persona is widely used to help design teams understand their target users. However, existing persona tools have limitations such as insufficient interactivity, inability to arouse designers' empathy, and inability to finely segment users. We developed Vivid-Persona, which is a customisable persona tool offering an interactive and immersive experience. Designers can set the demographics and scenarios of the target user to customise a persona. The tool generates a realistic image of the persona using a Diffusion model. Embedded with the ChatGPT and SadTalker models, the persona can engage in real-time video chats with designers. The persona is augmented with facial expressions, based on the analysis of the emotions in utterances. A user study showed that Vivid-Persona effectively solves the problem of user segmentation, significantly enhancing the designer's perception of persona in terms of authenticity, clarity, empathy and willingness to use, as well as the quality of the output design solutions.