Best And Worst Of Personas, 2007

To gauge the current state of personas, Forrester applied its persona evaluation criteria to reference personas provided by 23 interactive agencies. Most of the personas showed significant room for improvement — and problems ran the gamut in both type and severity. But our evaluations also revealed best practices for each of our six criteria among the two personas that earned nearly perfect scores and those that didn't pass our review. To get the most value out of persona projects, customer experience professionals should ask about prospective firms' research capabilities, evaluate their reference personas, find out how they use personas during the design process, and assess their ability to help drive persona adoption throughout the organization.