Personas are fictitious characters that are created to represent the different user types within a targeted demographic that might use a site or product. Personas are most often used as part of a user-centered design process for designing software or online applications, in which the goals, desires, and limitations of the user are considered when designing the product. They are also considered a part of interaction design. Personas are useful in helping to guide decisions about a product, such as features, interactions, and visual design. A user persona is a representation of the goals and behavior of real user group. In most cases, personas are synthesized from data collected from interviews with users. They are captured in 1-2 page descriptions that include behavior patterns, goals, skills, attitudes, and environment, with a few fictional personal details to bring the persona to life.
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Generally, user group profiles are not developed for all user groups, rather they are developed for the primary user groups and for user groups that designers don't know well. Because many designers start out with little or no knowledge of accessibility issues, adding accessibility considerations to user group profiles is particularly important.
UIaccess (2007). Articles>Web Design>User Centered Design>Personas
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Bringing Your Personas to Life in Real Life
The way you communicate 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. Let’s start with a review of what we know about personas, and why they are useful.
Freydenson, Elan. Boxes and Arrows (2002). Articles>User Centered Design>Personas
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Everyone is mad for personas. They’ve permeated the highest and deepest levels of organizations, and have become a standard interaction design tool. Whole projects are now built around creating them, and there’s a feeling that once you get a half dozen or so, your design problems will be solved. Presumably, your personas solve them for you. The problem is, most teams build personas from the wrong kind of user information, or worse, base them on assumptions. It’s no surprise that a Web search for personas brings up an amazing variety of persona sets, and most of them are terrible.
Saffer, Dan. Adaptive Path (2005). Articles>Usability>User Centered Design>Personas
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Who are your users? How do they work? How do your products fit into their routines? Filippo discusses audience analysis and developing user profiles to create effective user assistance.
Filippo, Elizabeth G. Intercom (2009). Articles>User Centered Design>Personas>Audience Analysis
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Communicating Customer and Business Value with a Value Matrix
If you’re like me, you’ve always felt something was missing once you finished creating your personas and scenarios. They communicate the heart and goals of the user, but miss out on a lot of details. And while it’s the intent of both documents to do just that, neither personas nor scenarios succinctly communicates to your business what features a product or service should have and why it should have them.
Cecil, Richard F. UXmatters (2008). Articles>Business Communication>Assessment>Personas
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Age 50+ Persona for the STC Body of Knowledge 
Many STC members have contributed to the Body of Knowledge and as the endeavor continues, the more important it becomes to gain many perspectives and ideas from all across the STC membership. SIGs have unique angles for their contributions. Lori Gillen, co-manager of the AccessAbility SIG, contributed this persona for use by the BOK. This persona illustrates pertinent accessibility issues that a body of knowledge for technical communicators should encompass.
Gillen, Lori. Tieline (2008). Articles>TC>Personas>Body of Knowledge
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What is an End-User Software Engineer? 
To address the challenge of developing a shared understanding of the users that participate in each scenario we have developed a set of personas that describe the work styles, characteristics and motivations that are common to particular groups of people using our products. The personas help us communicate these characteristics by humanizing them, increasing the empathy that team members have for these fictional users.
Clarke, Steven. Microsoft (2008). Articles>Usability>User Centered Design>Personas
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User Research for Personas and Other Audience Models
This is not going to be an article about personas or even what distinguishes a good persona from a bad one. Instead, this article is about the ingredients we can draw on when creating audience models and some alternative ways of communicating the results of an audience analysis. First, however, let me briefly discuss what we generally mean when we talk about personas and the role they play in the design and development process.
Baty, Steve. UXmatters (2009). Articles>User Centered Design>Audience Analysis>Personas
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Real or Imaginary: The Effectiveness of Using Personas in Product Design 
The use of personas as a method for communicating user requirements in collaborative design environments is well established. However, very little research has been conducted to quantify the benefits of using this technique. The aim of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of using personas. An experiment was conducted over a period of 5 weeks using students from NCAD. The results showed that, through using personas, designs with superior usability characteristics were produced. They also indicate that using personas provides a significant advantage during the research and conceptualisation stages of the design process (supporting previously unfounded claims). The study also investigated the effects of using different presentation methods to present personas and concluded that photographs worked better than illustrations, and that visual storyboards were more effective in presenting task scenarios than text only versions.
Long, Frank. Frontend Infocentre (2009). Articles>User Centered Design>Methods>Personas
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Caution: Stereotypes Under Construction
Now that I have your attention, I’ll tell you up front that what Janea follows is not a rant. It’s not even a statement for or against Triplett political correctness. It’s a caution–words of warning about the creation of personas and the practice of user profiling. Even if one calls it the development of an archetype or ideal type, it is still a stereotype.
Triplett, Janea. Journal of HCI Vistas (2007). Articles>User Centered Design>Methods>Personas
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Having worked with personas before the method ever came to be known as personas there are, from my research and practical experience, three important areas that have to be considered: the data material, engagement in the personas descriptions, and buy-in from the organization which is part of the development process whether it is redesign or a development from scratch. This is the rationale behind my development of 10 steps to personas, an attempt to cover the entire process from initial data gathering to ongoing development.
Nielsen, Lene. Journal of HCI Vistas (2007). Articles>User Centered Design>Methods>Personas
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User Persona: Its Application and The Art of Stereotyping
There is so much discussion about user personas, but very few examples are reported on Internet with some evidence of its actual usage. So here is a persona that I explored long back. It was useful!
Katre, Dinesh S. Journal of HCI Vistas (2007). Articles>User Centered Design>Personas>Case Studies
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Writing toward personas can help produce a successful form of content creation. Of course the next step after writing is to test the content with your customers to see if it indeed answers their questions. But there’s an important next step, especially if you’re a larger organization. You must work cross-silos to make sure different departments are not having contradictory conversations with the same customers. You also have to ensure that all the information on your site is current. If one department updates data, they all must still agree!
Spool, Jared M. and Janice C. 'Ginny' Redish. User Interface Engineering (2009). Articles>Interviews>Web Design>Personas
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What’s My Persona? Developing a Deep and Dimensioned Character
I believe designers gather data to understand the personas that represent the users for whom they are designing a user interface. This is quite similar to the way actors must develop an understanding of their characters. So, developing their character-building and storytelling skills can help designers—just as it does actors.
Lepore, Traci. UXmatters (2009). Articles>User Centered Design>Methods>Personas
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User Stories: A Strategic Design Tool
A collaborative approach enables clients to actively participate in the process, increasing the likelihood of achieving a collective vision for the project. This article focuses on the first step in the journey towards collaboratively developing a User Experience Strategy and is concerned specifically with how user stories are generated, themed and prioritized.
Hagen, Penny and Michelle Gilmore. Johnny Holland (2009). Articles>User Centered Design>User Experience>Personas
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How to Understand Your Users with Personas
Personas are a powerful tool for helping you to better understand the needs of your users. In this comic, drawn exclusively for Think Vitamin, you’ll learn more about Personas and how they’ll revolutionize the way you design and build web sites.
Colbow, Brad. Carsonified (2009). Articles>User Centered Design>Methods>Personas
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The Inmates Are Running the Asylum, published in 1998, introduced the use of personas as a practical interaction design tool. Based on the single-chapter discussion in that book, personas rapidly gained popularity in the software industry due to their unusual power and effectiveness. Had personas been developed in the laboratory, the full story of how they came to be would have been published long ago, but since their use developed over many years in both my practice as a software inventor and architectural consultant and the consulting work of Cooper designers, that is not the case. Since Inmates was published, many people have asked for the history of Cooper personas, and here it is.
Cooper, Alan. Cooper Journal (2003). Articles>User Centered Design>History>Personas
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Getting from Research to Personas: Harnessing the Power of Data
The usefulness of personas in defining and designing interactive products has become more widely accepted in the last few years, but a lack of published information has, unfortunately, left room for a lot of misconceptions about how personas are created, and about what information actually comprises a persona. Although space does not permit a full treatment of persona creation in this article, I hope to highlight a few essential points.
Goodwin, Kim. Cooper Journal (2002). Articles>User Centered Design>Methods>Personas
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Personas and Goal-Directed Design: An Interview with Kim Goodwin
We use personas because they are powerful design, measurement, and communication tools. We use them in design to help us avoid the elastic user problem--where "the user" is a total novice one minute and a technophile the next--as well as self-referential design, because designers are seldom representative of a product's target audience. Personas also help cut through assumptions that certain tasks are necessary; if a task doesn't directly help accomplish a goal, we can try to eliminate it.
Klee, Matthew. User Interface Engineering (2001). Articles>Interviews>User Centered Design>Personas
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What's Your Customer's Persona?
Using "personas" forces us to think carefully about who our customer is for each product — what they need and want and how they'll use it. We've come up with a few personas, and each one has a name and personality. Even for a book on business planning, for instance, "Sally Startup" has different needs than does "Vic Venture."
Abrams, Rhonda. USA Today (2005). Articles>User Centered Design>Methods>Personas
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As part of a project I'm working on, we are going to develop a comic-style collection of user scenarios to help communicate best practices around a security service we are offering.
Hughes, Michael A. User Assistance (2009). Articles>User Centered Design>Technical Illustration>Personas
