The idea of creating a persona to stand-in for the user was the inspiration of Alan Cooper. He calls them "the elastic user" and Tamara Adlin is a proponent of defining a persona to represent the target customer. As she says in an interview in Online Marketing Heroes, "when you're designing a customer experience online, finding out what makes them happy is much more helpful." Both Cooper and Adlin are fans of goal-driven design, a process of designing for "Rachel" and not for "Bob," the less important target customer. Sound complicated? Not really. Christina Small did an effective job of redesigning a poorly blue-printed website (renamed Connect.com) using a handful of well-researched personas.
