xBlog: The original visual thinking weblog

“Itís been said that personas have a limited value when it comes to design. I can see the validity in some of those arguments. I personally see them as very helpful in helping to get some visibility to your users to stakeholders and clients. They can also be excellent discussion tools, but outside of that Iíve realized that their usefulness in the design process is fairly limited. Although, now that I think about it, I do find the actual creation of personas to be helpful in other ways. It forces you to connect with your readers and users and that is always a good thing. The personas themselves, well, they might be a bit over-rated. I use a bit of a scaled down technique I call persona sketching and that seems to be a bit more practical than the use of full blown personas. Where I find them the most useful, personally anyway, is as a writing tool.”