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.

Scott Berkun conducted a survey surrounding the topic of

“why designers and people who work with designers believe designers don’t achieve the results they desire”

His top findings:

The 389 survey respondents self identified as:

The top 15 issues, ranked by average scores were:

More summary and breakdown of the results here

Two students from IIT went ahead and defined what ethnographic research is and how to conduct it. It was a great refresher for me. Thanks to Todd Warfel for originally posting this on his site.

Getting People to Talk: An Ethnography & Interviewing Primer from Gabe & Kristy