What Are Personas, Again?
By now, you’ve probably done some user research. You know what problems your product should solve, and you know what kinds of people will benefit from using it.
While designing your product, you’ll often refer to this information. But how do you do that? Talking about target demographics can be hard. Which part of your target audience has this problem? What’s their skill level?
Personas give you a way of synthesizing the information you’ve found during user research into a limited number of imaginary people.
When Alan Cooper first introduces personas as a software design technique in his book The Inmates Are Running the Asylum [Coo99], he describes them like this:
Personas are not real people...they represent them ...
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