Bot Personas as Off-The-Shelf Users

This alt.chi paper proposes the concept of bot personas. These interactive personas act as off-the-shelf users, as they allow design teams to interact with rich user data throughout the design process. Bot personas, as always-on participants, hold several opportunities to address some practical and ethical challenges of involving real-human-users. Therefore, bot personas could be a refreshing technological approach to lower the barriers of involving users, and thus bridge labor intensive academic practices and the realities of a corporate context.