Online Resources

• "Develop Personas" at Usability.gov
• "An introduction to personas and how to create them" by Tina Calabria
• "The origin of Personas" by Alan Cooper
• "Perfecting your Personas" by Kim Goodwin
• "Getting from Research to Personas: Harnessing the Power of Data" by Kim Goodwin
• "Crappy Personas vs. Robust Personas" by Jared Spool
• "Personas vs. User Descriptions; Apples vs. Tomatoes" by Jared Spool
• LiRPPS: Lightweight, Research-Based Principles, Personas, and Scenarios – Part 1 by Jared Spool
• LiRPPS: Lightweight, Research-Based Principles, Personas, and Scenarios – Part 2 by Jared Spool
  • Describes "Two-by-Two Comparison" mentioned in Persona Creation in "Pulling Out Persona Attributes"
• "The User is Always Right: Making Personas work for your site" by Steve Mulder
• "Making Personas Work for Your Web Site: An Interview with Steve Mulder" by Jared Spool
• "Goal-Directed Design: An Interview with Kim Goodwin" by Christine Perfetti or "SpoolCast: An Interview with Cooper's Kim Goodwin" with Christine Perfetti
• "Death To Personas! Long Live Personas!" by Liz Bacon - Good presentation on how to successfully use personas.
• "data driven design research personas" - Great, visual intro presentation on personas, touching on many of the points discussed above.
• http://www.personacreation.com/

Books

• The Inmates are Running the Asylum, Alan Cooper - this is the first time anyone used the term persona.  It's a ground breaking book that anyone interested in interaction design or software development for that matter, would benefit from reading.
• About Face 3.0 the Essentials of Interaction Design, by Alan Cooper, Robert Reimann, David Cronin - everything interaction design framed in Cooper's Goal Directed Design methodology
• The Persona Lifecycle, Keeping People in Mind Throughout Product Design, John Pruitt & Tamara Adlin