Personas for product development

Why Personas?
Personas are design tools to help product teams focus their solutions, products, features, etc. around the kind of person they are designing and building for. Personas remind teams about the needs, contexts, capabilities, challenges and goals, of the personas. Personas are not profiles of individuals, but rather, archetypes of motivations, observed behaviors. Each persona describes a group of people with similar goals, motivations and behaviors. Used as tool to refer to and solve discussions about what "the user wants", personas help team to focus what they design and build around the needs and solving challenges of the humans they are solving and building with and for.

Pragmatic Personas
Pragmatic personas are a set of personas built quickly from what is known (for example: self report surveys, academic research, and quantitative data) and being honest about what is not known. The benefit of pragmatic personas is that they can be created more quickly than personas based on research (qualitative research triangulated with any segmentation that is available). These pragmatic personas were created in 2015.

Personas from research in Nigeria and India
The Design Research team, Global Partnerships, Communications and the Reading team partnered to implement two contextual inquiries (one in Nigeria and one in India). These personas are directly from that research, and are being used by various teams in, the Wikimedia Foundation, as well as teams in Nigeria and India.