A Persona is a fictional but research-based description of a typical user. It gives an abstract target group a face: name, age, profession, goals, frustrations, and typical behaviors. Personas help teams make design decisions from the perspective of a concrete person rather than developing for an anonymous mass.
An example: after user interviews, the persona emerges — “Maria, 42, project manager at a mid-sized company. She juggles eight projects simultaneously, primarily needs a quick overview, and has no patience for tools that require configuration first.” When the team later debates a feature, it can ask: would Maria use this? Would it solve her problem? This specificity prevents teams from building features for themselves instead of for their users.
The concept was introduced by Alan Cooper in his 1999 book The Inmates Are Running the Asylum. Personas only work when they are based on real research. Purely invented personas merely confirm the team’s existing assumptions and thereby defeat their own purpose.
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