Personas

Personas are fictional characters, which you create based upon your research in order to represent the different user types that might use your service, product, site, or brand in a similar way. Creating personas will help you to understand your users’ needs, experiences, behaviours and goals.

Articles

A Closer Look At Personas: What They Are And How They Work

Personas help to keep a designer honest and to become mindful of when they are truly designing for others and when they are just designing for themselves. If you are going to design for someone unlike yourself, then do your users a solid and use a persona.

Creating Personas - A guide, not a template

Personas are all about building empathy amongst your team. Great software gets made when the people who make it care about the people who use it. That means during every meeting, when making any decision, in every design and with every line of code, you should first be thinking about your users.

Data-Driven Personas at Salesforce - Understanding Our Users in a Whole New Way

They’ve landed on data-driven personas as an efficient, research-led method for better understanding their users. User personas based on data provide their designers, product managers, doc writers, engineers, and executives with a common shorthand for their users that’s both easy to use and is based in current data about their user base.

Videos

How To Create UX Personas

In this video, Gregg Bernstein describes how to perform basic user research, turn that research into personas to inform your design decisions, and get everybody in your team on board with using them.

Lean Personas by Adrian Howard

In this ProductTank talk, Adrian Howard argues that these “set and forget” personas are expensive, both in terms of the effort to build them, and the damage they can do to your product. They take too long to develop and become set in stone, unable to keep up with the changing realities around the user.