HCI Theory & Practice - Personas

Definition of a Persona: "A persona is a rich picture of an imaginary person who represents your core user group"
(Beale et al, 2004, Human-Computer Interaction 3rd Edition)

Where possible, we will try to involve many real life users into the design process as possible as well as using persona's. When formulating a design solution from assessing the persona's and real life users, as a group we can ask, "How will X react to this?". By asking these types of questions, we can then begin to imagine how the end user will interact and behave, which will inevitably aid in the decision to choose the prospective idea.