I thought that Personas were a very tedious way of learning about a target audience. It seems like a lot of steps and work to interview people in the audience, enough to get the kind of data you're looking for, make the profiles, create screening groups, etc. etc. But I did see some benefits of Personas.
One, they create a strong focus on users in a fictionalized setting, which allows for more variables and possibilities when dealing with the scenarios. They can be more shallow or really in depth. For example, I found these personas created for public use by Penn State's Teaching and Learning with Technology Unit as models for any digital medium. They had to have been created by studying many pictures and features of different ethnic groups, because otherwise their portrayals would not be accurate. However, they do not need to delve into the personal lives of the people they're modeling because that is not a part of the rendering of the illustration.
These persona profiles seem very in-depth and research intensive, but not very design oriented. I don't think I get much of a personal response to these people because there is nothing dynamic about the presentation.
This does a better job of visualizing the different facets of the target audience's concerns and priorities. The persona becomes the focus by being the center from which everything radiates. There's not as much information as the one above, but you are a bit better connected to the real 'Angie.'
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