Developing personas for your web audience

Here's a link to a good video about developing personas for your web audience. How can you design a site, or add new features or content without knowing who you're targeting? Granted, personas are more art than science, and well-designed surveys and usability tests are other things you should be doing to learn more about your audience. But they can still be helpful.

Last summer, one of my colleagues and I put together a set of personas for the IndustryWeek.com audience. Unfortunately we didn't have the benefit of watching this video first, so it was a little more painful since we had never done it before and didn't know some of the helpful pointers covered here. But it was still a good exercise that helped our sales team (and even us) internalize some of the key attributes of our audience.