Personas provide a qualitative representation of user behaviour and bring users to life by giving them names, personalities and lifestyles. They identify the motivations, expectations, goals, capability, skills and attitudes of users, which are responsible for driving their product purchasing and usage behaviour.

Although personas are fictitious, they are based on the knowledge of real users. Some form of user research is necessary to generate personas that represent real end users, rather than the opinions of the project team.

It ’s easy to assemble a set of user characteristics and call it a persona, but it’s not so easy to create personas that are truly effective tools for design and communication.

For each product or service, it is useful to create a small set of personas to provide a focus for the design team.