Now is probably a good time to pause in our quest for the perfect persona and to ask a few questions--just to make sure we're on the right track.

These six questions were developed by Forrester Research as best practices for developing personas.

First question: Does your persona sound real? Your persona should focus your team's attention and remind them they're designing for real people. So it helps if that persona is believable. Look for traits that sound credible, that work together to create a consistent view of this person's life. You want to include enough specific details to help your team empathize with this character.

Question two: Does the persona have a compelling story? It doesn't have to be To Kill a Mockingbird, but it helps if there is some sort of narrative that connects to your persona's character. It could be as simple as dropped out of college to follow his girlfriend who was offered a job in another city. Because people aren't just a bunch of character traits stitched together like... Well, like that! Real people do things and things happen to them. That's what shapes their personalities.

Question three: Does the persona enable design decisions? Remember why we're creating this persona. It's a tool to help you design your product, so make sure the features of that persona truly reflect the needs and motivations of the user. Don't make the mistake of coming up with something that is just a reflection of your own business goals. It has to be about the user.

Question four: Does the persona have decent production values? Design matters. The persona needs to have a certain professional polish. Choose a good quality photo that is well lit, properly focused, and the right resolution. The photo is the first thing that people are going to connect with. Make sure your persona's profile is laid out in a pleasing manner and that the text is free of typos or grammatical errors.

Question five: Have you presented the persona in a way that calls out the key goals and attributes? Make sure you highlight the persona's most important character traits, high-level goals, and give them a visual emphasis. Not everything is equally important.

Question six: Is using the persona convenient and appealing? This is really just question four and five restated, but you do want to make sure that as a tool, the persona is something that your stakeholders want to refer to. If they can easily find and process the information embodied in your persona, they'll be far more likely to use it.

If you can answer "yes" to all of these questions, you're likely to have a solid functioning persona to serve as a working design reference for the life of your project.