NNGroup Personas (Essence / Three Types / Scope & Hierarchy / Creation / Comparison with JTBD, Archetypes, Segments / Application / Maintenance / 5 Major Failures)
15 essential articles from the Nielsen Norman Group persona knowledge base. A persona = compressing "abstract user groups" into a small number of fictional individuals that the team can remember and empathize with, used to align design perspectives. Essence (depict inner motivations, not external behaviors / not demographics) / Three types (Lightweight Proto, Qualitative, Statistical; qualitative is the optimal choice for most teams) / Scope and hierarchy (broad vs narrow · organization → business line → product → project; personas cannot be one-size-fits-all) / What information to include when creating · team collaboration · editable formats / Personas vs Archetypes vs Jobs To Be Done (JTBD) vs Customer Segments (one table to distinguish the four tools) / Three usage methods (feature priority matrix · scenario mapping workshop · segmented data analysis) / Maintenance (living document · when to update · update frequency is positively correlated with impact) / 5 major failure causes + solutions / Underlying principle: design for the users you actually have, not ideal users / Special population: designing and testing for children.