“(…) although personas are essential design tools, we think some people may be losing sight of the fact that they’re just tools, and tools with a specific purpose, at that. Lately, we’ve been seeing a lot of gold-plated hammers – unnecessarily elaborate communication about personas – and some fundamental misunderstandings about the relationships among research, personas, and scenarios.” (Kim Goodwin – Cooper newsletter)

“I asked Alan Cooper (over a rather echoing connection) why he is outraged by bad software, and how he developed the concept of ‘personas’. I was interested to hear the ‘father of Visual Basic’ say ‘What I need is a computer that doesn’t make me feel bad and a cellphone that doesn’t make me feel stupid’.” (UXpod)

“Method acting is just one technique to better enable user-centered design and is not intended to replace observational usability testing, but it can (and should) work in unison. For each observational user test, your actors will gain even more insights to the real world and can refine their method.” (Zef Fugaz – Boxes and Arrows)

“Too busy to decide if you want to buy the book? Try the podcasts, which take you on a whirlwind tour of the book’s content. The audio comes from a Molecular webinar I did a while back. For the industrious, you can also download the PowerPoint slides used in the webinar (warning: 23MB) for the full audio/visual experience.” (Steve Mulder – Practical Personas)

Review by Ross Gagliano – “(…) for our computer professional society, one may wonder whether such a book will find its way into either a computer science or an information system curriculum. Good questions! Being contrary, maybe it should. However, my own experience suggests that it may be way too massive (722 pages) and terribly glitzy (hundreds of cartoon figures) to become a standard course text.” (ACM Ubiquity)

“(…) a site devoted to the art and science of personas. It’s also the companion site to the book. The goal of this site is to keep the conversation going.” (Steve Mulder and Ziv Yaar)

Sample chapter from: John Pruitt and Tamara Adlin, The Persona Lifecycle: Keeping People in Mind Throughout Product Design, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers 2006 – (Book Profile)

“Business people and designers are never going to speak the same language, and that’s okay. Each needs their own language to get their work done. To make great products, we have to create new ways to understand each other and work together as we keep our collective focus on the users of our products. Personas not only help translate and keep communication channels open between designers and business people, they also help to create and maintain a focus on customers and their needs throughout the design process. The persona approach has helped a variety of companies (…) improve not just their products and services, but their bottom line as well.” (Tamara Adlin and John Pruitt – AIGA Gain) – courtesy of bplusd

“Solid personas can be incredibly helpful. Several years ago, Schwab redesigned its site based on three primary personas: the learner, the active trader, and the serious investor. Apple has had some great successes designing for an aesthete persona who demands that things look clean and work smoothly.” (Dan Shaffer – Adaptive Path)

“How can something that feels so right be so wrong? Personas ought to be one of the defining techniques in user-focused design. Lots of professionals create them, yet too often the personas end up being too vague to guide a product’s focus. They often lack the detail to be useful in guiding low-level design trade-offs. And, as typically done, personas have been too narrowly focused. They often aren’t helpful in identifying the information a user needs or creates. Nor do they have much to say about the sensory and emotional aspects of user experience—the sorts of factors that cause consumers to lust after products like Apple’s iPod.” (turok – LiveJournal)

“Do you work in a medium-to-large organization whose web content you feel could be put to better use? If so, you’re my target reader.” (Gerry McGovern)

“The first step in developing successful reader personas is to decide what readers you are not going to focus on. Good web management is often more about what you exclude than what you include.” (Gerry McGovern)

“Personas are becoming a regular staple in many of the development teams we talk to. The method helps teams make a smooth translation between requirements and design, resulting with much cleaner designs. The benefits of preventing grounding, encouraging story telling, and enhancing role playing are rarely discussed, yet very present when you see the method in full force. It’s these benefits that guide our belief that personas will be a trusted method for many years to come.” (Jared Spool)

“Do Personas have to be accurate? Do they require a large body of research? No, I conclude. The Personas must indeed reflect the target group for the design team, but that is about all. A Persona allows designers to bring their own life-long experience to bear on the problem, and because each Persona is a realistic individual person, the designers can focus upon features, behaviors, and expectations appropriate for this individual, allowing the designer to screen off from consideration all those other wonderful ideas they may have.” (Donald Norman) – courtesy of elearningpost

“Personas and other user-modeling techniques are often solely discussed as tools for product definition and design, but they are useful tools in other arenas, as well. Technical writers responsible for creating user documentation can benefit greatly from a well-defined persona set, too.” (Steve Calde – Cooper Newsletter)

“So we decided to see if we could make group personas. At first, there was some apprehension – what if the groups are so varied as to be impossible to characterize? But as soon as we started making them, only several different kinds of personas made sense and it became a straightforward extension of Alan Cooper’s original persona technique. Here’s how we did it.” (Mike Kuniavsky – Boxes and Arrows)

“Personas ought to be one of the defining techniques in user-focused design. Lots of professionals create them, yet too often the personas end up being too vague to guide a product’s focus. They often lack the detail to be useful in guiding low-level design trade-offs.” (George Olsen – Boxes and Arrows)

“Personas is an interaction design technique with considerable potential for software product development. (…) Personas are more engaging than design based primarily on scenarios.” (John Pruitt and Jonathan Grudin – Microsoft Research) – courtesy of henrik olsen

“We try to understand an audience through numbers, charts and graphs, but often times we lose sight of the people who represent these statistics. The MSN audience is comprised of a broad range of users at different stages in their life, who use MSN in their own unique way. To help better define the people behind the numbers, MSN has created personas for some key audience segments.” (MSN Advertising) – courtesy of brett lider

“Before embarking on any intranet or website design project, it is important to understand the needs of your users. It is then possible to identify the features and functionality that will make the intranet or website a success, and how the design can support users with different goals and levels of skill.” (Tina Calbria – Step Two Designs) – courtesy of elearningpost