Finally got your clients or internal constituants to see the value of creating personas? If so, congratulations—that's half the battle. Now that you are empowered to humanize the experience, see George Olsen's Persona Toolkit (can be downloaded from boxes and arrows). It's extremely comprehensive and defines how Personas should be used—along with the many different ways you can approach creating your personas. It's a couple of years old, but great resource.
Overview:
“This toolkit provides resources for a variety of situations. Pick and choose what’s appropriate for your’s. My goal is to enable you to use personas in several ways:
Allow you and your team to live and breathe your users’ world as if they were a close friend or part of the family.
• Allow you as a designer to filter out your own personal quirks (or those of real users that you
interviewed) and focus instead on behaviors and motivations that are typical of a broader range
of users, while still being able to relate to users as individuals.
• Use this knowledge to make better decisions at the strategic level of matching the product’s focus
and purpose to users needs and goals.
• Use this knowledge to make better design decisions at the tactical level of how functionality,
content and sensory elements are structured and presented.
• Use it as a tool to make the design trade-offs that are inevitable in any product’s development.”
