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

talk to at least a couple of power users.

three types of qualitative research for creating personas: • One-on-one interviews, the most common approach used for personas. • Field studies in which you go to users’ offices or homes, watch their normal routine, and also interview them. • Usability tests that consist in watching people use your site to perform tasks in order to learn about real

talk with non-customers as well, or even lapsed customers,

First and foremost, personas are grounded in research.

make your personas real: Give them a name and photo, create a background and scenarios—that kind of thing.

In some situations, personas are also defined by their behaviors and attitudes—that is, how users actually behave

Serendipity and surprise lead to insights, and those are best achieved by allowing the conversation to go wherever it leads.

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.

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.