The talk gives first hand experience on creating personas - a usability tool for designing user interfaces - and how to incorporate them in the design process.
Personas are hypothetical users which you can use when designing features for your application, to anticipate user interaction based on their goals. One of many problems in software engineering is providing consistent and easy to use user interfaces. How do you know what UI enables your users to get things done? How do you find a solution if you have conflicting interests? How do you build an interface, which doesn't leave decisions about configuration of the UI up to the user.
This talk will offer a solution to these questions by making use of personas. It will give first hand experience from developing personas for Beaker: from user interviews to how we incorporate them in our design process.