The Great Steps of User-Centered Design: Step 1. Recognize that business results depend on making your users happy. Step 2. Realize that you are not your users. Step 3. Learn about your users by interacting with them. Step 4. Make the findings of this research understandable and actionable. Step 5. Make decisions based on this newfound user knowled

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.

Qualitative research doesn’t prove anything, since you’re talking with a limited number of people, but it’s very valuable at uncovering insights that you can then test or prove.

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.

remember about finding a range of users is that goals, attitudes, and behaviors matter most. Getting a range of ages, incomes, and other demographics is less useful

Aggregating user research and paring it down into something portable and digestible is an essential step in making it useful to others.

A persona is a realistic character sketch representing one segment of a Web site’s targeted audience. Each persona is an archetype serving as a surrogate for an entire group of real people.

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.

Through talking with and observing users, you can gather a list of goals, attitudes, and behaviors that can become potential ways of segmenting your audience and thus defining personas.