And preferably, pictures of people.

When discussing ideas for products, we talk about users, because we know that user-centered products do well. But we carry divergent pictures of the users in our minds, and at different levels of abstraction. And while we use the same words, we don’t use the same language.

If product teams invest time in building authentic and appealing user personas, they can arrive at a shared language. And I hope they do, it will give us products which suit our needs better.

(How to start? I think bolt|peters has done some inspiring work on making personas. They don’t just make single page views, but also movie trailers and storybooks, probably giving the teams a gut-level understanding of their users).