Where does persona collide?

The assumed voice or speaker of a literary work, the character through whom a text is uttered, held apart from the flesh-and-blood author. The word descends from the Latin persona, the mask worn by actors in Roman theater; in modern poetics the term returned with Ezra Pound's 1909 collection Personae, whose poems speak in adopted voices, and Robert Elliott's 1982 The Literary Persona gave it a systematic critical account as the fictive speaker distinct from the writer. Here the referent is a rhetorical figure on the page, a voice the reader reconstructs from the text, not a living person's outward social mask or a designer's imagined user.[1][2]

Unit

One assumed voice or speaker attributed to a work or body of work

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Identified by close reading, inferred from tone, diction, and stance in the text rather than from the author's biography

In analytical psychology, the persona is the outward face a person presents to the world, the compromise formed between the individual and society about how one should appear. Jung coined the psychological meaning in his 1921 Psychologische Typen and developed it in Two Essays on Analytical Psychology (1953), where the persona is a functional complex that mediates between the ego and the demands of social life and can be mistaken for the whole self. Here the referent is a feature of a living psyche, a mask an individual wears in social relations, not the speaking voice of a poem or a fictional profile built to guide product design.[3][4]

Unit

One individual's outward social face, described qualitatively

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Approached in clinical work through interview, dream material, and analysis rather than by a single standard numeric scale

In interaction design and human-computer interaction, a persona is a fictional, archetypal user, a named and described stand-in for a real user group, constructed to guide design decisions. Alan Cooper introduced the method in his 1999 The Inmates Are Running the Asylum, and Pruitt and Grudin's 2003 Personas: Practice and Theory set out how such profiles are grounded in user research and used across a product team. Here the referent is a deliberately invented character built as a design tool, an aid to imagining who a product serves, not the outward mask of an actual psyche or the speaking voice of a literary text.[5][6]

Unit

One named fictional user profile representing a segment of real users

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Built from qualitative and quantitative user research such as interviews, surveys, and behavioral data, then checked against real user segments

In popular music studies, persona refers to the presented self a musician performs, distinct from the real person and from the characters in songs. This meaning comes from Auslander (2006) in TDR/The Drama Review.[7]

Unit

Recovery means

Measured by