User is Always Right, The: A Practical Guide to Creating and Using Personas for the Web

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.

talk to at least a couple of power users.

Think of personas as a decision-making tool that brings user research to life in a way that is actionable.

focus groups are not particularly useful for generating personas. Individual voices can be drowned out by groupthink,

In some situations, personas are also defined by their behaviors and attitudes—that is, how users actually behave

Because interviews leading into personas are more useful when they’re more informal, create a checklist of topics to cover, rather than a verbatim questionnaire to follow.

use the following familiar categories: • Goals • Behaviors • Attitudes • Demographics

Making data memorable is about packaging it in such a way that people will remember it when they are in a situation in which it would be useful.

Personas put a face on user research in a way that turns data into the kind of knowledge that leads to better user experiences and better Web sites.