Personas are a vital tool in designing a product or interface that connects with its users. When you don’t have clear personas as your designing guide, other factors get in the way. Ultimately the interaction fails: it gets made for ease of the coder rather than ease of the user, features get added that don’t present a strong benefit to the user, without a single vision everyone ends up compromising and nothing gets accomplished thoroughly. Below are a few key nuggets I took from the sources at the end of this post.

Why personas are effective:
1. Easier design consensus because you have something concrete to refer to
2. Helps people set aside personal opinions and base decisions on the user
3. Makes it more likely to use the persona in decisions
- Easier to recall the persona
- Personalizes otherwise abstract data about customers
4. Helps the team understand the target users
5. Early user validation
6. Helps identify key requirements by going through use cases

What are Ad Hoc Personas?
1. Like data driven personas they are specific detailed descriptions
2. Created in direct collaboration w/ high-level stakeholders
3. Can and should be created before collecting any more data
4. A focus and communication tool first and a product design tool second
5. Prioritized according to business objectives before communicated to rest of the organization

Why use Ad Hoc Personas?
1. Collecting more data is expensive and often not very helpful if you don’t know what you need to collect
2. Personas are there like it or not so get on the same page rather than working with different users in mind
3. The executive team is probably not clear on business objectives and personas can help
4.  Ad Hoc personas are quick and inexpensive
5. Pulling the right kind of data is hard enough and Ad Hoc Personas help in getting organized and on the same page first
6. When everyone has a different user in mind everyone tends to make tiny compromises which end up as tiny holes in product and a big compromise in the end

What Personas should include:
1. Name and picture
2. Demographics (age, education, ethnicity, family status)
3. Job title and major responsibilities
4. Goals, tasks scenarios, interactions
5. Environment (physical, social, technological)
6. A quote that sums up what matters most to the persona with relevance to interaction with the product

How to make Data-driven Personas:
1. Gather information from user Interviews
2. Refine, analyze distill into one or multiple fictitious characters/archetypes
3. Develop one or many Characters in realistic detail
4. One persona should always be the primary focus for the design
5. Use role-playing and QA sessions using the persona to evaluate design solutions

Real or Imaginary: The effectiveness of using personas in product design
The Power of Ad Hoc Personas
The Essence of a Successful Persona Project
Usability.gov