The usage of Personas in Interaction Design initiatives has been my focus of reading the last few days. However, I have mainly focused on the works of Cooper and Nielsen.

Today I was given a lead about a more pragmatical short paper presented at the NordicCHI 2008 titled “Personas: From Theory to Practices“. I strongly recommend reading the short paper, and I would like to share some central ideas I can extract from it:

1. Personas never completely built up from user data. They are greatly made up by the designers imagination.
2. Every created Persona keeps developing as the design project goes on.
3. A Persona is built from a combination of traits from different users + the designers imagination. Is never from a single user.
4. Sometimes the design team works with an Unspoken Persona. This situation leads to each design team member having in mind a different Persona.