Creating personas to guide your UX strategy

When talking about personas, one assumes it refers to the target market or segmentation of a campaign or brand, the terms often used in marketing to describe the groups of users a brand or product is marketed to. The traditional target market is usually a collection of users created from data sourced from analytics or market research. Target markets tend to be treated as a clinical entity, like a set of numbers, whereby user research together with analytics and market research make the target market more personal and relatable to all the teams within an organization.

What is a persona? In the UX context a persona is a fictional character with human characteristics, behaviors, and needs based on a segmentation of the target market collected from actual data through field research.

It's a common misperception that personas are created...