Generating Proto-Personas through Prompt Engineering: A Case Study on Efficiency, Effectiveness and Empathy
Abstract
Proto-personas are commonly used during early-stage Product Discovery, such as Lean Inception, to guide product definition and stakeholder alignment. However, the manual creation of protopersonas is often time-consuming, cognitively demanding, and prone to bias. In this paper, we propose and empirically investigate a prompt-engineering-based approach to generate proto-personas with the support of Generative AI (GenAI). Our goal is to evaluate the approach in terms of efficiency, effectiveness, user acceptance, and the empathy elicited by the generated personas. We conducted a case study with 19 participants embedded in a real Lean Inception, employing a qualitative and quantitative methods design. The results reveal the approach’s efficiency by reducing time and effort and improving the quality and reusability of personas in later discovery phases, such as Minimum Viable Product (MVP) scoping and feature refinement. While acceptance was generally high, especially regarding perceived usefulness and ease of use, participants noted limitations related to generalization and domain specificity. Furthermore, although cognitive empathy was strongly supported, affective and behavioral empathy varied significantly across participants. These results contribute novel empirical evidence on how GenAI can be effectively integrated into software Product Discovery practices, while also identifying key challenges to be addressed in future iterations of such hybrid design processes.
Keywords:
prompt engineering, proto-persona, generative artificial intelligence, product discovery
References
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Lenz Belzner, Thomas Gabor, and Martin Wirsing. 2023. Large language model assisted software engineering: prospects, challenges, and a case study. In International Conference on Bridging the Gap between AI and Reality. Springer, 355–374.
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Anders Bruun, Niels van Berkel, Dimitrios Raptis, and Effie Lai-Chong Law. 2025. Coordination Mechanisms in AI Development: Practitioner Experiences on Integrating UX Activities. In Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’25). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1–14. DOI: 10.1145/3706598.3713200 Presented at CHI 2025, Yokohama, Japan.
Juan González Calleros, Soraia Prietch, and Josefina Guerrero García. 2024. Using AI Tools for Generating Proto-Personas: An Exploration in the Design of Strategies for Promoting Ethical Awareness on Responsible Computing. Avances en Interacción Humano-Computadora 2024 (2024), 1–16. [link] Accessed: 2025-04-24.
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Daniela Soares Cruzes and Tore Dybå. 2011. Recommended Steps for Thematic Synthesis in Software Engineering. In Proceedings of the International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement. 275–284. DOI: 10.1109/ESEM.2011.36
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Christof Ebert and Panos Louridas. 2023. Generative AI for software practitioners. IEEE Software 40, 4 (2023), 30–38.
Angela Fan, Beliz Gokkaya, Mark Harman, Mitya Lyubarskiy, Shubho Sengupta, Shin Yoo, and JieMZhang. 2023. Large language models for software engineering: Survey and open problems. arXiv preprint arXiv:2310.03533 (2023).
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Victoria Jackson, Guilherme Vaz Pereira, Rafael Prikladnicki, Andre van der Hoek, Luciane Fortes, Carolina Araújo, Andre Coelho, Ligia Chelli, and Diego Ramos. 2025. Exploring GenAI in Software Development: Insights from a Case Study in a Large Brazilian Company. (2025).
Soon-Gyo Jung, Jisun An, Haewoon Kwak, Moeed Ahmad, Lene Nielsen, and Bernard J Jansen. 2017. Persona generation from aggregated social media data. In Proceedings of the 2017 CHI conference extended abstracts on human factors in computing systems. 1748–1755.
Sora Kang, Andreea-Elena Potinteu, and Nadia Said. 2025. ExplainitAI: When do we trust artificial intelligence? The influence of content and explainability in a cross-cultural comparison. In Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’25). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA. [link] Late-Breaking Work.
Devi Karolita, John C. Grundy, Tanjila Kanij, Jennifer McIntosh, and Humphrey O. Obie. 2024. Lessons Learned from Persona Usage in Requirements Engineering Practice. 1–10.
Devi Karolita, Jennifer McIntosh, Tanjila Kanij, John Grundy, and Humphrey O Obie. 2023. Use of personas in Requirements Engineering: A systematic mapping study. Information and Software Technology (2023), 107264.
Raul Leão, Fernando Ayach, Vitor Lameirão, and Awdren Fontão. 2024. A Prompt Engineering-based Process to Build Proto-personas during Lean Inception. In Proceedings of the XXXVIII Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering. SBC, Porto Alegre, RS, Brasil, 588–594. DOI: 10.5753/sbes.2024.3562
Jianing Liu, Jia Shi, Jun Xie, Xinyun Zhang, Zichuan Zhang, John Grundy, and Tanjila Kanij. 2022. A curated personas and design guidelines tool for better supporting diverse end-users. In 2022 IEEE 46th Annual Computers, Software, and Applications Conference (COMPSAC). IEEE, 1606–1613.
Pengfei Liu, Weizhe Yuan, Jinlan Fu, Zhengbao Jiang, Hiroaki Hayashi, and Graham Neubig. 2023. Pre-train, prompt, and predict: A systematic survey of prompting methods in natural language processing. Comput. Surveys 55, 9 (2023), 1–35.
Patricia Losana, John W Castro, Xavier Ferre, Elena Villalba-Mora, and Silvia T Acuña. 2021. A systematic mapping study on integration proposals of the personas technique in agile methodologies. Sensors 21, 18 (2021), 6298.
Maylon Macedo, Gabriel V. Teixeira, Ariel E. S. Campos, and Luciana Zaina. 2024. Supporting User-Centered Requirements Elicitation from Lean Personas: A UX Data Visualization-Based Approach. In In Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems (ICEIS 2024) - Volume 2. 461–472. DOI: 10.5220/0012567400003690
Nuno Marques, Rodrigo Rocha Silva, and Jorge Bernardino. 2024. Using Chat-GPT in Software Requirements Engineering: A Comprehensive Review. Future Internet 16, 6 (2024), 180.
Jennifer McIntosh and Humphrey O. Obie. 2024. Recommendations for Effective Persona Usage in Requirements Engineering. In 2024 IEEE 32nd International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE). 216–225. DOI: 10.1109/RE60410.2024.00033
Jürgen Münch, Stefan Trieflinger, and Bernd Heisler. 2020. Product Discovery - Building the Right Things: Insights from a Grey Literature Review. In 2020 IEEE International Conference on Engineering, Technology and Innovation (ICE/ITMC). 1–8. DOI: 10.1109/ICE/ITMC49519.2020.9198328
Anh Nguyen-Duc, Beatriz Cabrero Daniel, Adam Przybylek, Chetan Arora, Dron Khanna, Tomas Herda, Usman Rafiq, Jorge Melegati, Eduardo Guerra, Kai-Kristian Kemell, Mika Saari, Zheying Zhang, Huy Le, Tho Quan, and Pekka Abrahamsson. 2023. Generative Artificial Intelligence for Software Engineering – A Research Agenda. CoRR abs/2310.18648 (2023). DOI: 10.48550/ARXIV.2310.18648 arXiv:2310.18648
Jakob Nielsen and Thomas K. Landauer. 1993. A Mathematical Model of the Finding of Usability Problems. In Proceedings of the INTERCHI ’93 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, 206–213. DOI: 10. 1145/169059.169166
OpenAI. 2024. Prompt Engineering Guide. [link]. Accessed: 2025-07-03.
Eduardo Gouveia Pinheiro, Larissa Albano Lopes, Tayana Uchôa Conte, and Luciana Aparecida Martinez Zaina. 2018. The contribution of non-technical stakeholders on the specification of UX requirements: an experimental study using the proto-persona technique. In Proceedings of the XXXII Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering. 92–101.
Wilson Pádua. 2010. Measuring Complexity, Effectiveness and Efficiency in Software Course Projects. In Proceedings of the 32nd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering - Volume 1 (ICSE ’10). ACM, 473–482. DOI: 10.1145/1806799.1806878
Paul Ralph, Nauman bin Ali, Sebastian Baltes, Domenico Bianculli, Jessica Diaz, Yvonne Dittrich, Neil Ernst, Michael Felderer, Robert Feldt, Antonio Filieri, Breno Bernard Nicolau de França, Carlo Alberto Furia, Greg Gay, Nicolas Gold, Daniel Graziotin, Pinjia He, Rashina Hoda, Natalia Juristo, Barbara Kitchenham, Valentina Lenarduzzi, Jorge Martínez, Jorge Melegati, Daniel Mendez, Tim Menzies, Jefferson Molleri, Dietmar Pfahl, Romain Robbes, Daniel Russo, Nyyti Saarimäki, Federica Sarro, Davide Taibi, Janet Siegmund, Diomidis Spinellis, Miroslaw Staron, Klaas Stol, Margaret-Anne Storey, Davide Taibi, Damian Tamburri, Marco Torchiano, Christoph Treude, Burak Turhan, Xiaofeng Wang, and Sira Vegas. 2020. Empirical Standards for Software Engineering Research. arXiv:2010.03525 [cs.SE] [link]
John Roberts, Max Baker, and Jane Andrew. 2024. Artificial Intelligence and Qualitative Research: The Promise and Perils of Large Language Model (LLM) ’Assistance’. Critical Perspectives on Accounting 99 (2024), 102722. DOI: 10.1016/j.cpa.2024.102722
Per Runeson and Martin Höst. 2009. Guidelines for conducting and reporting case study research in software engineering. Empirical software engineering 14 (2009), 131–164.
Daniel Russo. 2024. Navigating the complexity of generative ai adoption in software engineering. ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology 33, 5 (2024), 1–50.
Joni Salminen, Kathleen Wenyun Guan, Soon-Gyo Jung, and Bernard Jansen. 2022. Use cases for design personas: A systematic review and new frontiers. In Proceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 1–21.
Benjamin Saunders, Julius Sim, Tom Kingstone, Shula Baker, Jackie Waterfield, Bernadette Bartlam, Heather Burroughs, and Clare Jinks. 2018. Saturation in qualitative research: exploring its conceptualization and operationalization. Quality & quantity 52 (2018), 1893–1907.
Jaakko Sauvola, Sasu Tarkoma, Mika Klemettinen, Jukka Riekki, and David Doermann. 2024. Future of software development with generative AI. Automated Software Engineering 31, 1 (2024), 26.
Gabriel Viana Teixeira and Luciana A. M. Zaina. 2022. Using Lean Personas to the Description of UX-related Requirements: A Study with Software Startup Professionals. In Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems (ICEIS), Volume 2. SciTePress.
Stefan Trieflinger, Dominic Lang, Selina Spies, and Jürgen Münch. 2023. The discovery effort worthiness index: How much product discovery should you do and how can this be integrated into delivery? Information and software technology 157 (2023), 107167.
YiWang, Chetan Arora, Xiao Liu, Thuong Hoang, Vasudha Malhotra, Ben Cheng, and John Grundy. 2025. Who uses personas in requirements engineering: The practitioners’ perspective. Information and Software Technology 178 (2025), 107609. DOI: 10.1016/j.infsof.2024.107609
Edvaldo Wassouf-Jr, Pedro Fukuda, and Awdren Fontão. 2025. Investigating the Developer Experience of LGBTQIAPN+ People in Agile Teams. In 2025 IEEE/ACM 47th International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering in Society (ICSE-SEIS). IEEE, 43–54.
Jules White, Quchen Fu, Sam Hays, Michael Sandborn, Carlos Olea, Henry Gilbert, Ashraf Elnashar, Jesse Spencer-Smith, and Douglas C Schmidt. 2023. A prompt pattern catalog to enhance prompt engineering with chatgpt. arXiv preprint arXiv:2302.11382 (2023).
Lixiang Yan, Vanessa Echeverria, Gloria Milena Fernandez-Nieto, Yueqiao Jin, Zachari Swiecki, Linxuan Zhao, Dragan Gašević, and Roberto Martinez-Maldonado. 2024. Human-AI Collaboration in Thematic Analysis Using Chat-GPT: A User Study and Design Recommendations. In Extended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 1–7. DOI: 10.1145/3613905.3650732
Xishuo Zhang, Lin Liu, YiWang, Xiao Liu, HailongWang, Chetan Arora, Haichao Liu, Weijia Wang, and Thuong Hoang. 2024. Auto-Generated Personas: Enhancing User-centered Design Practices among University Students. In Extended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 1–7.
X. Zhang, L. Liu, Y. Wang, X. Liu, H. Wang, A. Ren, and C. Arora. 2023. PersonaGen: A tool for generating personas from user feedback. In 2023 IEEE 31st International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE). 353–354. DOI: 10.1109/RE57278.2023.00048
Xishuo Zhang, Lin Liu, Yi Wang, Xiao Liu, Hailong Wang, Anqi Ren, and Chetan Arora. 2023. PersonaGen: A Tool for Generating Personas from User Feedback. In 2023 IEEE 31st International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE). IEEE, 353–354.
Yinkun Zhu, Qiwen Liu, and Li Zhao. 2025. Exploring the impact of generative artificial intelligence on students’ learning outcomes: a meta-analysis. Education and Information Technologies (2025). DOI: 10.1007/s10639-025-13420-z
Chetan Arora, John Grundy, and Mohamed Abdelrazek. 2023. Advancing requirements engineering through generative ai: Assessing the role of llms. arXiv preprint arXiv:2310.13976 (2023).
Leonardo Banh, Florian Holldack, and Gero Strobel. 2025. Copiloting the Future: How Generative AI Transforms Software Engineering. Information and Software Technology (2025), 107751.
Tuomas Bazzan, Benjamin Olojo, Przemysław Majda, Thomas Kelly, Murat Yilmaz, Gerard Marks, and Paul Clarke. 2024. Analysing the Role of Generative AI in Software Engineering – Results from an MLR. In Systems, Software and Services Process Improvement (EuroSPI 2024) (Communications in Computer and Information Science, Vol. 1927). Springer Nature, 163–180. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-71139-8_11
Lenz Belzner, Thomas Gabor, and Martin Wirsing. 2023. Large language model assisted software engineering: prospects, challenges, and a case study. In International Conference on Bridging the Gap between AI and Reality. Springer, 355–374.
Jan Bosch. 2019. From Efficiency to Effectiveness: Delivering Business Value Through Software. In Software Business. ICSOB 2019 (Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, Vol. 370), Sami Hyrynsalmi, Mari Suoranta, Anh Nguyen-Duc, Pasi Tyrväinen, and Pekka Abrahamsson (Eds.). Springer, Cham, 3–10. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-33742-1_1
Anders Bruun, Niels van Berkel, Dimitrios Raptis, and Effie Lai-Chong Law. 2025. Coordination Mechanisms in AI Development: Practitioner Experiences on Integrating UX Activities. In Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’25). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1–14. DOI: 10.1145/3706598.3713200 Presented at CHI 2025, Yokohama, Japan.
Juan González Calleros, Soraia Prietch, and Josefina Guerrero García. 2024. Using AI Tools for Generating Proto-Personas: An Exploration in the Design of Strategies for Promoting Ethical Awareness on Responsible Computing. Avances en Interacción Humano-Computadora 2024 (2024), 1–16. [link] Accessed: 2025-04-24.
Paulo Caroli. 2017. Lean inception. São Paulo, BR: Caroli. org (2017).
Daniela Soares Cruzes and Tore Dybå. 2011. Recommended Steps for Thematic Synthesis in Software Engineering. In Proceedings of the International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement. 275–284. DOI: 10.1109/ESEM.2011.36
Fred D. Davis. 1989. Perceived Usefulness, Perceived Ease of Use, and User Acceptance of Information Technology. MIS Quarterly 13, 3 (1989), 319–340. DOI: 10.2307/249008
Christof Ebert and Panos Louridas. 2023. Generative AI for software practitioners. IEEE Software 40, 4 (2023), 30–38.
Angela Fan, Beliz Gokkaya, Mark Harman, Mitya Lyubarskiy, Shubho Sengupta, Shin Yoo, and JieMZhang. 2023. Large language models for software engineering: Survey and open problems. arXiv preprint arXiv:2310.03533 (2023).
Bruna Moraes Ferreira, Simone D. J. Barbosa, and Tayana Conte. 2016. PATHY: Using Empathy with Personas to Design Applications that Meet the Users’ Needs. In Human-Computer Interaction. Theory, Design, Development and Practice (Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 9731). Springer, 153–165. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-39510-4_15
J. Gothelf. 2012. Using proto-personas for executive alignment. [link]
Jeff Gothelf. 2013. Lean UX: Applying lean principles to improve user experience. " O’Reilly Media, Inc.".
Hashini Gunatilake, John Grundy, Rashina Hoda, and Ingo Mueller. 2024. Enablers and Barriers of Empathy in Software Developer and User Interactions: A Mixed Methods Case Study. ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology 33, 4 (2024), 109. DOI: 10.1145/3641849
Hashini Gunatilake, John Grundy, Ingo Mueller, and Rashina Hoda. 2023. Empathy Models and Software Engineering — A Preliminary Analysis and Taxonomy. Journal of Systems and Software 203 (2023), 111747. DOI: 10.1016/j.jss.2023.111747
Victoria Jackson, Guilherme Vaz Pereira, Rafael Prikladnicki, Andre van der Hoek, Luciane Fortes, Carolina Araújo, Andre Coelho, Ligia Chelli, and Diego Ramos. 2025. Exploring GenAI in Software Development: Insights from a Case Study in a Large Brazilian Company. (2025).
Soon-Gyo Jung, Jisun An, Haewoon Kwak, Moeed Ahmad, Lene Nielsen, and Bernard J Jansen. 2017. Persona generation from aggregated social media data. In Proceedings of the 2017 CHI conference extended abstracts on human factors in computing systems. 1748–1755.
Sora Kang, Andreea-Elena Potinteu, and Nadia Said. 2025. ExplainitAI: When do we trust artificial intelligence? The influence of content and explainability in a cross-cultural comparison. In Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’25). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA. [link] Late-Breaking Work.
Devi Karolita, John C. Grundy, Tanjila Kanij, Jennifer McIntosh, and Humphrey O. Obie. 2024. Lessons Learned from Persona Usage in Requirements Engineering Practice. 1–10.
Devi Karolita, Jennifer McIntosh, Tanjila Kanij, John Grundy, and Humphrey O Obie. 2023. Use of personas in Requirements Engineering: A systematic mapping study. Information and Software Technology (2023), 107264.
Raul Leão, Fernando Ayach, Vitor Lameirão, and Awdren Fontão. 2024. A Prompt Engineering-based Process to Build Proto-personas during Lean Inception. In Proceedings of the XXXVIII Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering. SBC, Porto Alegre, RS, Brasil, 588–594. DOI: 10.5753/sbes.2024.3562
Jianing Liu, Jia Shi, Jun Xie, Xinyun Zhang, Zichuan Zhang, John Grundy, and Tanjila Kanij. 2022. A curated personas and design guidelines tool for better supporting diverse end-users. In 2022 IEEE 46th Annual Computers, Software, and Applications Conference (COMPSAC). IEEE, 1606–1613.
Pengfei Liu, Weizhe Yuan, Jinlan Fu, Zhengbao Jiang, Hiroaki Hayashi, and Graham Neubig. 2023. Pre-train, prompt, and predict: A systematic survey of prompting methods in natural language processing. Comput. Surveys 55, 9 (2023), 1–35.
Patricia Losana, John W Castro, Xavier Ferre, Elena Villalba-Mora, and Silvia T Acuña. 2021. A systematic mapping study on integration proposals of the personas technique in agile methodologies. Sensors 21, 18 (2021), 6298.
Maylon Macedo, Gabriel V. Teixeira, Ariel E. S. Campos, and Luciana Zaina. 2024. Supporting User-Centered Requirements Elicitation from Lean Personas: A UX Data Visualization-Based Approach. In In Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems (ICEIS 2024) - Volume 2. 461–472. DOI: 10.5220/0012567400003690
Nuno Marques, Rodrigo Rocha Silva, and Jorge Bernardino. 2024. Using Chat-GPT in Software Requirements Engineering: A Comprehensive Review. Future Internet 16, 6 (2024), 180.
Jennifer McIntosh and Humphrey O. Obie. 2024. Recommendations for Effective Persona Usage in Requirements Engineering. In 2024 IEEE 32nd International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE). 216–225. DOI: 10.1109/RE60410.2024.00033
Jürgen Münch, Stefan Trieflinger, and Bernd Heisler. 2020. Product Discovery - Building the Right Things: Insights from a Grey Literature Review. In 2020 IEEE International Conference on Engineering, Technology and Innovation (ICE/ITMC). 1–8. DOI: 10.1109/ICE/ITMC49519.2020.9198328
Anh Nguyen-Duc, Beatriz Cabrero Daniel, Adam Przybylek, Chetan Arora, Dron Khanna, Tomas Herda, Usman Rafiq, Jorge Melegati, Eduardo Guerra, Kai-Kristian Kemell, Mika Saari, Zheying Zhang, Huy Le, Tho Quan, and Pekka Abrahamsson. 2023. Generative Artificial Intelligence for Software Engineering – A Research Agenda. CoRR abs/2310.18648 (2023). DOI: 10.48550/ARXIV.2310.18648 arXiv:2310.18648
Jakob Nielsen and Thomas K. Landauer. 1993. A Mathematical Model of the Finding of Usability Problems. In Proceedings of the INTERCHI ’93 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, 206–213. DOI: 10. 1145/169059.169166
OpenAI. 2024. Prompt Engineering Guide. [link]. Accessed: 2025-07-03.
Eduardo Gouveia Pinheiro, Larissa Albano Lopes, Tayana Uchôa Conte, and Luciana Aparecida Martinez Zaina. 2018. The contribution of non-technical stakeholders on the specification of UX requirements: an experimental study using the proto-persona technique. In Proceedings of the XXXII Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering. 92–101.
Wilson Pádua. 2010. Measuring Complexity, Effectiveness and Efficiency in Software Course Projects. In Proceedings of the 32nd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering - Volume 1 (ICSE ’10). ACM, 473–482. DOI: 10.1145/1806799.1806878
Paul Ralph, Nauman bin Ali, Sebastian Baltes, Domenico Bianculli, Jessica Diaz, Yvonne Dittrich, Neil Ernst, Michael Felderer, Robert Feldt, Antonio Filieri, Breno Bernard Nicolau de França, Carlo Alberto Furia, Greg Gay, Nicolas Gold, Daniel Graziotin, Pinjia He, Rashina Hoda, Natalia Juristo, Barbara Kitchenham, Valentina Lenarduzzi, Jorge Martínez, Jorge Melegati, Daniel Mendez, Tim Menzies, Jefferson Molleri, Dietmar Pfahl, Romain Robbes, Daniel Russo, Nyyti Saarimäki, Federica Sarro, Davide Taibi, Janet Siegmund, Diomidis Spinellis, Miroslaw Staron, Klaas Stol, Margaret-Anne Storey, Davide Taibi, Damian Tamburri, Marco Torchiano, Christoph Treude, Burak Turhan, Xiaofeng Wang, and Sira Vegas. 2020. Empirical Standards for Software Engineering Research. arXiv:2010.03525 [cs.SE] [link]
John Roberts, Max Baker, and Jane Andrew. 2024. Artificial Intelligence and Qualitative Research: The Promise and Perils of Large Language Model (LLM) ’Assistance’. Critical Perspectives on Accounting 99 (2024), 102722. DOI: 10.1016/j.cpa.2024.102722
Per Runeson and Martin Höst. 2009. Guidelines for conducting and reporting case study research in software engineering. Empirical software engineering 14 (2009), 131–164.
Daniel Russo. 2024. Navigating the complexity of generative ai adoption in software engineering. ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology 33, 5 (2024), 1–50.
Joni Salminen, Kathleen Wenyun Guan, Soon-Gyo Jung, and Bernard Jansen. 2022. Use cases for design personas: A systematic review and new frontiers. In Proceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 1–21.
Benjamin Saunders, Julius Sim, Tom Kingstone, Shula Baker, Jackie Waterfield, Bernadette Bartlam, Heather Burroughs, and Clare Jinks. 2018. Saturation in qualitative research: exploring its conceptualization and operationalization. Quality & quantity 52 (2018), 1893–1907.
Jaakko Sauvola, Sasu Tarkoma, Mika Klemettinen, Jukka Riekki, and David Doermann. 2024. Future of software development with generative AI. Automated Software Engineering 31, 1 (2024), 26.
Gabriel Viana Teixeira and Luciana A. M. Zaina. 2022. Using Lean Personas to the Description of UX-related Requirements: A Study with Software Startup Professionals. In Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems (ICEIS), Volume 2. SciTePress.
Stefan Trieflinger, Dominic Lang, Selina Spies, and Jürgen Münch. 2023. The discovery effort worthiness index: How much product discovery should you do and how can this be integrated into delivery? Information and software technology 157 (2023), 107167.
YiWang, Chetan Arora, Xiao Liu, Thuong Hoang, Vasudha Malhotra, Ben Cheng, and John Grundy. 2025. Who uses personas in requirements engineering: The practitioners’ perspective. Information and Software Technology 178 (2025), 107609. DOI: 10.1016/j.infsof.2024.107609
Edvaldo Wassouf-Jr, Pedro Fukuda, and Awdren Fontão. 2025. Investigating the Developer Experience of LGBTQIAPN+ People in Agile Teams. In 2025 IEEE/ACM 47th International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering in Society (ICSE-SEIS). IEEE, 43–54.
Jules White, Quchen Fu, Sam Hays, Michael Sandborn, Carlos Olea, Henry Gilbert, Ashraf Elnashar, Jesse Spencer-Smith, and Douglas C Schmidt. 2023. A prompt pattern catalog to enhance prompt engineering with chatgpt. arXiv preprint arXiv:2302.11382 (2023).
Lixiang Yan, Vanessa Echeverria, Gloria Milena Fernandez-Nieto, Yueqiao Jin, Zachari Swiecki, Linxuan Zhao, Dragan Gašević, and Roberto Martinez-Maldonado. 2024. Human-AI Collaboration in Thematic Analysis Using Chat-GPT: A User Study and Design Recommendations. In Extended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 1–7. DOI: 10.1145/3613905.3650732
Xishuo Zhang, Lin Liu, YiWang, Xiao Liu, HailongWang, Chetan Arora, Haichao Liu, Weijia Wang, and Thuong Hoang. 2024. Auto-Generated Personas: Enhancing User-centered Design Practices among University Students. In Extended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 1–7.
X. Zhang, L. Liu, Y. Wang, X. Liu, H. Wang, A. Ren, and C. Arora. 2023. PersonaGen: A tool for generating personas from user feedback. In 2023 IEEE 31st International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE). 353–354. DOI: 10.1109/RE57278.2023.00048
Xishuo Zhang, Lin Liu, Yi Wang, Xiao Liu, Hailong Wang, Anqi Ren, and Chetan Arora. 2023. PersonaGen: A Tool for Generating Personas from User Feedback. In 2023 IEEE 31st International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE). IEEE, 353–354.
Yinkun Zhu, Qiwen Liu, and Li Zhao. 2025. Exploring the impact of generative artificial intelligence on students’ learning outcomes: a meta-analysis. Education and Information Technologies (2025). DOI: 10.1007/s10639-025-13420-z
Published
2025-09-22
How to Cite
AYACH, Fernando; LAMEIRÃO, Vitor; LEÃO, Raul; FELIZARDO, Jerfferson; SOBRINHO, Rafael; BORGES, Vanessa; MATSUBARA, Patrícia; FONTÃO, Awdren.
Generating Proto-Personas through Prompt Engineering: A Case Study on Efficiency, Effectiveness and Empathy. In: BRAZILIAN SYMPOSIUM ON SOFTWARE ENGINEERING (SBES), 39. , 2025, Recife/PE.
Anais [...].
Porto Alegre: Sociedade Brasileira de Computação,
2025
.
p. 126-137.
ISSN 2833-0633.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5753/sbes.2025.9835.
