How can Personas be useful for developers??

Christina Braz asks:

I have just finished to read your article about personas on the Web. Although I agree with your statements I still have a question in my mind: How do Personas can be useful for developers?? You provide personas in order to developers start to develop an application. I am in the process of developing personas for a new security application and I have heard from someone else a quotation from one of our developers: “I don’t care about personas at all. I simply don’t use it.”

Christina Braz | Senior Software Engineer, UXD Team |

Answer: Most developers are not involved in the decision about using the personas and do not know how to use them. To put personas posters on the wall or quotes on mugs are just not enough.

In my experience what do help is to let the developers experience the strength of method when a persona description is put in action in a scenario. I do scenario workshops with the developers. In the workshop they learn to use the personas and they experience how thinking about personas gives them new insights for system demands and requirement specifications. Finally we talk about how they can move from the scenario descriptions to e.g. use cases or how they can use personas in their use cases.
So the short answer is Training and experiencing clear the way.