Personas: Matching a Design to the Users' Goals
http://www.uie.com/articles/Personas.htm

Perfetti, Christine
User Interface Engineering
2001

Abstract:

We hear all the time from designers that they're faced with the huge challenge of designing products and web sites for a large number of different users. Many designers tackle this problem by making the functionality of the web site or product as extensive as possible. To do this, they outline all of the goals of each user, identify any commonalities between these goals, and add all of the functionality needed to satisfy these common goals.