Purpose
The purpose of personas is to create representations of your key audience segments for reference. These representations should be based on qualitative and some quantitative user research. Remember, your personas are only as good as the research behind them.
• Personas are effective as they capture real user behavior patterns regarding the use of a specific product.
• Personas allow you to focus on a specified set of users to make better product design decisions.
• Personas put a face to your users, creating empathy for their needs and goals in a way that other artifacts cannot.
Determine what a product should do and how it behaves based on the needs of the user.
Communicate with stakeholders, developers and designers. Personas provide a common language.
Build Consensus among the team as to how the product should behave.
Measure a designs effectiveness by comparing concepts to the stated goals and needs of the user.
Note: This does not replace the need for usability testing
Persona Lifecycle
We utilized the concept of the persona lifecycle, adapted from the book by the same name, but with a few naming tweaks.