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Ralph Lauren believes in personas
Back when Oprah was still on (it wasn't as long ago as it seems), she devoted one of her last shows to Ralph Lauren. I loved something he said.
If you said, ‘Just design that dress for that girl,’ I couldn’t do it. But if you say, ‘She lives in a mansion or she lives in Soho and she’s an artist,’ I could design exactly how she should look, how her hair should be, what she should be wearing, and I could create a world with her. And I pin her up on a wall and I say, ‘Now I know what she needs.’
What Ralph Lauren is describing here is personas, in a loose way. He knows to design that effectively, he's got to know something about his user. He wants to know who his end user is, how she'll interact with his product, how it will meet her specific needs, and how it will fit into her life. He uses this information for inspiration but also for usability.
Personas are descriptions of your user archetypes. After hours and hours of interviews of dozens of users, you'll find they typically fall in about 3-6 categories that are differentiated by goals, skill levels, expectations, and other characteristics. You create a detailed description, or "a world with her" for each archetype, slap on a name, and suddenly instead of designing for a population of nameless, faceless users, you're designing for "Sue," "Robert," "Allie," etc.
Historically, creating personas is a protracted process. However, if time and money are tight, we believe personas are important enough to create using the data you have available. Pull out everything you know about your customers now, and put it to use. Review it all, discover the main differentiators among your customers, and separate them into a handful of groups. Your persona is a generalized, but detailed, description of each group. You'll be astonished at the empowering impact these have on your designs.
