Welcome

One of my friends is looking into the way people use personas in design. We had a open discussion the other night about our capstones and she asked each of us to talk about how we use personas in design.

After a bit of thinking I have found that I have adapted this concept in a way that I find useful. For my capstone I have an idea of a few people I feel could benefit from what I am designing but I haven't written the details down about this person.

Also thinking about the CHI project we had a persona at one point in time but she didn't really end up being an exact target of our design. In this case we were designing for a group not one person.

Personas are a good way to introduce user centered design. I am not sure if people who have embraced the idea of user centered design and understand who they are designing for need to stick so closely to the persona tool. Does anybody else have thoughts on this?