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Spotted the persona debate via VUI design, which started on UX Soapbox in response to Jason @ 37signals post on Personas.
Well Jason is right personas don’t talk but people do and Terry is also right when he says "personas are the output of talking to real people". Actually, I feel the debate should be on how seriously we take personas during the product development phase and how do we really make the use of it.
For me the persona is really in my mind and when I was a product manager (and content programming manager now), I bring up personas really for the explanation for marketing persons and to the management. You cannot design products just based on your usage of the product.
I may work on the product which won’t be used by me at all. Say for example, I am making a social network for women. In the real world business examples I would need to give clarity to my team mates in terms of personas. For my learning I would have to talk to ‘real women’ and create few personas or profiles of my users who will use my products. I would also do a ‘role play’ and think what would I want as a user and this would be in top of my mind as few general persona types or the ‘collective personas’. Now if the management asks me or the marketing guys asks me, I will have to talk to them in their language and make them understand clearly what are my users like and what I am I catering to - which will come through these personas types.
I guess this is exactly like acting, some people are method actors and pick up observations, be in the situation or create profiles of people in their mind. Whereas, some people would just play the character through their normal understanding of acting, character and people. There is no right or wrong and there are no rules, what matters is - do you really understand your users and make them like and use or products - which should be the ultimate goal
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