A model of a fictitious, but representative of real life, site user.
Personas are a key tool for user-centred website planning and design. They help website planners to discover requirements and organise, design and test a proposed website.
Personas don't describe real users or stereotypes. They represent clusters of user goals and behaviours in the form of composite target users.
When a persona has a name, a photo and other ethnographic background, it becomes familiar to the planning team and can be used as verbal shorthand for groups of user requirements.
For example, it would be typical for a website planner to ask "How would John (a persona) use this part of the site? What are John's goals on this page? How does John prefer to see information presented? Does this page also cater for Mary (another persona)?"
Personas are best based on observations of real users in field studies. However, when field studies are not possible, personas still help to focus on user goals and to make assumptions about users explicit.
