http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/personas-and-the

The biggest insight I get from this story? Personas are not documents, and they are not the result of a step-by-step method that automagically pops out convenient facsimiles of your users. Personas are actually the designer’s focused act of empathetic imagination, grounded in first-hand user knowledge.

The team’s persona descriptions weren’t the source of the designers’ empathy —that kind of immersion doesn’t happen from reading a document. Although the team used various documentation media throughout their work – whiteboards and stickies, diagrams and renderings – these media furthered the design only as ephemeral artifacts of deeper understanding.

And that statement is especially true of personas. They’re not the same as market segmentation, customer profiling or workflow analysis, which are tools for solving other kinds of problems. Neither do personas fit neat preconceptions, use-cases or demographic models, because reality is always thornier and more difficult. Personas aren’t ornaments that make us more comfortable about our design decisions. They should do just the opposite—they may even confound and bedevil us. But they can keep us honest. Imagine that.

Nella progettazione centrata sull'utente (UCD, User-Centered Design) un passaggio chiave è quello di definire i personaggi (o personas), ovvero degli "utenti tipo" sui quali verrà centrata tutta la progettazione del servizio web. Alla fine del proce...