Personas - to do or not to do
Where I work we occasionally create personas as a deliverable. The problem is sometimes it’s fabricated, sometimes, it’s based on marketing data, and sometimes it’s based on design research. Personas are a tool like anything else in a UX designer’s toolkit. It may or may not be the right tool for the project but the danger of distributing them without real research is it can derail the project and have the client holding on to archetypes that aren’t real.
Elizabeth Bacon and Steve Calde presented these slides at Catalyze webinar on July 23, 2008. They’re a great summary of why, when, how to use personas.