Experience using Personas

Taking the "you" out of user: My experience using personas is a wonderful little piece from Meg Hourihan, co-founder of Pyra - the company behind Blogger.  "Personas" are a concept from Alan Cooper that he describes in his book The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High-Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity.  Inmates is one of my favorite books.

As described by Cooper, personas are a way of giving a face to potential users of software. Cooper suggests giving them a name, a backstory, and using them as as way to test your assumptions.  I.E.: "Mike is a 67 year old retired mechanic. He's not particularly computer-phobic, but he's not real savvy, either.  He's never been big on writing, and his spelling skills need help." What would Mike think of Radio?  (He'd probably be lost without a spelling checker.) 

Meg describes how their initial take on their target customers was radically changed after they used personas to try to think of how real users might approach their product.

From [Boxes and Arrows].