#28355
Method acting can take your personas from the page to the stage. Think beyond traditional practice to give emotional life to your personas.
Fugaz, Zef. Boxes and Arrows (2006). Articles>Usability>Methods>Personas
#21274
Bringing Your Personas to Life in Real Life
The way you communicate the personas and present your deliverables is key to ensuring consistency of vision. Without that consistency, you'll spend far too much time arguing with your colleagues about who your users are rather than how to meet their needs.
Freydenson, Elan. Boxes and Arrows (2002). Articles>Usability>Methods>Personas
#26763
Personas are a documented set of archetypal users who are involved with a product, typically the product's users. Each persona has a name and a picture. They're supposed to give designers a sense that they are designing for specific people, not just generic, ill-defined users. Done well, this is exactly what personas do. The problem is, most teams build personas from the wrong kind of user information, or worse, base them on assumptions.
Saffer, Dan. Adaptive Path (2005). Articles>Usability>Methods>Personas
#22670
Personas: Setting the Stage for Building Usable Information Sites
Personas are hypothetical archetypes, or 'stand-ins' for actual users that drive the decision making for interface design projects. Personas are not real people, but they represent real people throughout the design process. Personas are not 'made up'; they are discovered as a by-product of the investigative process.
Head, Alison J. Online Magazine (2003). Articles>Usability>Methods>Personas
#23989
Reconciling Market Segments and Personas
Market segmentation and personas are two different techniques that are often perceived as conflicting methods, but they are actually complementary tools that organizations can use to design and sell successful products.
Cooper Interaction Design (2002). Articles>Usability>Methods>Personas
#27980
The Return on Investment (ROI) for Personas
For a variety of reasons, persona efforts tend to peter out rather than end in a managed, measured, and organized manner. Consultants are usually not paid to stick around long enough to manage the personas at the end of a project and in-house teams are usually more concerned with ramping up for the next project than they are with tidying up loose ends from the previous one. Being first-in/last-out on projects means that you will probably end up with responsibilities that straddle two projects. You will be completing your work on project A even after you have begun your work on project B. That is no simple task. It is certainly easier to simply move on to project B. However, we argue that an organized approach to measuring and managing the end of a project can yield significant benefits.
Light, Ann. uiGarden (2006). Articles>Usability>Methods>Personas
#23869
Using Personas: Bringing Users Alive
How do we communicate what we know about the people who use our products in an engaging, efficient way? How do we get beyond statistics to a portrait of users that helps us use this information to make decisions?
Quesenbery, Whitney. Usability Interface (2003). Articles>Usability>Methods>Personas
