The reason that personas are so useful is that they provide a rich means to create a deep understanding of, and empathy for, customers, future customers, and other stakeholders. By using personas, not only do the possible actions and behaviors of customers become clearer, but the reasons for these actions and behaviors can be understood and used to create better customer experiences.

Personas enable creators to stand in their users’ shoes – to internalize them and to empathize with them. Using personas brings a number of benefits [1]:

• Users' goals and needs are made explicit and create a common frame of reference.
• A small, manageable set of personas can represent the needs of many different users.
• Personas are relatively quick to develop and replace the need to survey the entire user community taking months to gather user attitudes and requirements.
• They avoid the trap of building what users ask for rather than what they will actually use.
• Product capability, feature, design, and promotion decisions can be explicitly justified by referring to the personas.
• Offerings and activities can be evaluated against the personas to reduce the frequency of large and expensive usability tests too early in the process.
• A persona’s description can be understood throughout an organization, not just by the marketing department, because they are represented by tangible needs and desires.

According to Cooper, personas offer a solution to a common problem in the product creation process. Concepts such as ’user’, ‘designed for the user’ and ‘user-friendly’ are too vague and therefore not practical for making decisions about a new offering. After all, there is no ‘one’ user. With a fuzzy concept of ‘the user’ it is easy to justify almost any product alternative or feature with the result often being a bad compromise or way off the mark. Cooper calls this phenomenon “the elastic user” and recommends never referring to ‘the user,’ but instead, a very specific archetypal individual – a persona – and direct the offering to this individual. According to Cooper, “The more specific the persona is, the more effective they are as design tools. With more specific, idiosyncratic details, the persona becomes a real person in the minds of the developers.”

1 - List has been adapted and updated from "An Introduction to personas and how to create them" by Step Two Designs Pty Ltd.; March 2004