Groupsona: A Method for Discovering the Needs of Social Interaction Embedded Services

Service design determines the success of a business operation. How to identify customers´ needs and design high-quality services are important issues. Persona has been adopted as a tool for identifying needs of individual users for service design. Its focus on individual needs reveals its limitations in failing to capture the interactions among individuals. This study proposes a new user-needs assessment method, named Groupsona, to identify individual customer´s social needs of interacting with other members in the group. Groupsonas are group archetypes that represent customers´ needs based on the group´s perspectives and the interactive behaviors of users in the group. Based on concepts of constructing egocentric network in Social Network Analysis, Groupsona provides a tool for recognizing network patterns and understanding the various ways of group interactions. We applied Groupsona to analyze weight loss group members´ needs. The analytical results showed Groupsona can represent and identify the characteristics of customers´ needs.