PersonaEval: Persona-Based User Simulation for Evaluating Interactive Applications

2026-08-16

AI Summary

This study addresses the evaluation bottleneck caused by the high cost and limited scalability of real-user studies by proposing a role-based universal user simulation framework. By integrating role datasets with application interfaces to capture interaction trajectories, this method establishes a pluggable and parallelizable automated evaluation workflow. Empirical validation across diverse scenarios, including questionnaires, chatbots, and web applications, demonstrates that the framework supports plug-and-play testing and effectively overcomes traditional scalability limitations. Consequently, it generates reproducible, high-quality user feedback, offering an efficient and scalable paradigm for evaluating interactive applications.

Abstract

Real user studies are important for understanding how people interact with systems under test or already deployed. In practice, however, they are often costly, time-consuming, and difficult to scale. To address these challenges, we introduce PersonaEval, a persona-based user simulation framework that approximates real-user behavior across diverse interactive settings. PersonaEval connects simulated users drawn from existing persona datasets to task-specific application interfaces and collects the interaction trajectories and outcomes. PersonaEval provides a plug-and-play evaluation workflow in which the application being evaluated can be easily changed. In this demo, we present PersonaEval on three forms of interactive applications: surveys, chatbots, and web applications. Together, these examples show that PersonaEval can support repeatable, parallelizable, and scalable evaluation across different interaction settings, while producing user-oriented feedback and task-specific behavior.

Problem

• User Simulation
• Interactive Application Evaluation
• Real User Studies
• Scalability

Innovation

• User Simulation
• Persona-Based Evaluation
• Interactive Applications
• Plug-and-Play Workflow
• Scalable Evaluation