Usability Views Article Details  home | timeline | recent | popular | e-reports | userati | books | about  Three Important Benefits of Personas (07 Dec 2004) Creating an interface for yourself is great if you're going to be the only user. When we decide how we'll arrange our kitchen cabinets -- where the plates, glasses, pots, and pans will go -- we want to put ourselves into the design. But, we don't expect other people to wander into our kitchen and start grabbing things without help. When we're creating online interfaces, it's a whole different story. Here we're designing for others, not for ourselves. We may know too much about the layout and structure. We'll understand the relationships between various design elements ("That button is only used with this dropdown"). We are very familiar with the jargon and business rules. Therefore, when a designer grounds themselves in their own design, they run the risk of designing an interface that only they can use. Any tools that help designers to prevent the natural behavior of grounding helps them attack the design more objectively, with their target user in mind. Article URL: http://www.uie.com/articles/benefits_of_personas/ Read 80 more articles from User Interface Engineering sorted by date, popularity, or title. Next Article: A-Z Website Indexes Explained     This site is a labour of love built by Chris McEvoy