Designing For Yourself vs Designing For Your Users

So its a month to my midpoint (pre-thesis) presentation and we’re scrambling to fill in the gaps. I realized that it isn’t enough that we had this vague and general audience called Young Designers (a.k.a art students and pros starting out). So I thought why not include user profiles or persona? Rereading up on the topic revealed how important they could be when creating interface designs and deciding what (extra) functionalities to have.

So what is a persona anyways? A persona is a fictional character. WTF? What’s it good for? Exactly my reaction a while ago. But hear me out for a bit. A persona is created from a information acquired by interviewing members of your target audience. Think of it as french fries…each frie is more or less the same albeit each has slightly different qualities. Now when you think of french fries, you think of them in groups (an order of fries). Instead of trying to consider what dip would go best with each individual frie (a bunch of solutions that might not work together (e.g. wasabi + ketchup + soysauce + to infinity), you evaluate the entire thing and choose a dip that satisfies everything (the best solution, i.e. plain ketchup with a little salt). This sounds totally senseless, but I beg you to read this article: Personas: Setting the Stage for Building Usable Information Sites. They do a much better job of explaining it than I can.

Edit: Also try this article by Avenue A - RazorFish: Creating Quality Personas