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

when you sum up all the interviews, you’ll have a master list of user goals, behaviors, and attitudes you’re heard from users.

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.

information about actual behavior is most valuable, because it’s the most accurate.

work best as informal, loosely structured conversations, rather than as readings of a rigid list of questions to the user.

First and foremost, personas are grounded in research.

To make them credible, you need proof that: • Each persona represents real users that you care about. • The personas’ attributes and descriptions are accurate and complete. • The set of personas covers the full range of your users.

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.

three primary approaches explored in this book, based on the type of research and analysis performed: • Qualitative personas • Qualitative personas with quantitative validation • Quantitative personas

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