personas for all types of decision-making, whether you’re defining your overall online business strategy or designing the site’s navigation. The key is to keep your personas alive within your organization, making them an explicit part of your everyday process for creating or improving the site.

Serendipity and surprise lead to insights, and those are best achieved by allowing the conversation to go wherever it leads.

Personas help you define for whom you’re creating the site. Creating personas forces you to spend time thinking about which types of users are critical to your business, so no one wastes precious time thinking about people who don’t really matter.

Qualitative research is all about finding stories. You meet the characters, you listen to the plot lines for their goals and behaviors, and from the way they tell their stories, you discover their attitudes. Understanding breeds empathy, and empathy enables you to generalize and retell their stories as personas.

Just as a persona has goals, the business has goals for that persona. You create personas to discover how best to serve your different types of users, but you should also agree on what you want them to do. Creating business objectives for each persona ensures that you don’t lose sight of the overall goal: creating a conversation with users that

information about actual behavior is most valuable, because it’s the most accurate.

When I write a survey, I use the following list as a starting point for the order in which I ask questions: • Current goals, usage, and behavior, including channel usage • History with the site and company • Use of or importance of existing features and content • Satisfaction with existing features and content • Overall reaction to new concept(s) •

To make them credible, you need proof that: • Each persona represents real users that you care about. • The personas’ attributes and descriptions are accurate and complete. • The set of personas covers the full range of your users.

Another approach is to go where your users are and recruit there. This can be a physical place like a store, or a Web site discussion board, email list, or blog.