By thinking about end users as we develop new technologies and policies, we can educate users, encourage the behaviors that lead to good security practices, and help users when, inevitably, something goes wrong.

A persona is the output of user research, which may have taken the form of ethnographic studies, user interviews, surveys, and diary studies with actual or representative users. Most importantly, the personas you develop were based on research—not guessing.

As a user experience (UX) research tool, surveys can be an effective starting point for UX research—especially if your resources are limited and your stakeholders are skeptical. But, because surveys are cheap and easy to administer to get lots of results, product teams sometimes use them in place of conducting more extensive UX research.