I suspect you might need to ask a different question. It is hard for me to grasp what can be meant by "validating personas" - it could be a concern about the appropriateness or usefulness of the outcome of the research that resulted in the personas created, which I can understand. Other than that I am not sure what validation would mean.
If that is the concern, I would try and ask myself first what is really bothering you. Is it lack of detail? Do the personas seem shallow and non-actionable? Are the stories describing the personas in context far-fetched? I think those could be symptoms of personas that may not be expressing the reality of the audience you are designing for and you may have good instincts about what purpose your personas could/should be serving. It could indicate the research effort focused on the wrong (aspect of a broad) audience or the analysis surfaced less important attributes than it should have.
If the issue is more abstract such as "Is designing with these personas in mind and for the scenarios of use they are presented in, RELEVANT?" it might be a hint to some lack of definition about the audience you intend to serve in the first place - something identified before the research even started. That could possibly have derailed the research effort or provided too narrow/broad focus for the research.
For example, if your persona study started out trying to profile a general/existing customer base instead of trying to represent possible users of a specific service/product/outcome that fulfills a specific need, maybe that is a hint that the personas you ended up with just represent "some" audience, not necessarily the audience you need to be designing for.
Having said that - and again, sounds like you need to ask different question - if I were to try and "validate" the relevance or approprietness of my research effort via personas, the last people I would ask would be my end users. Personas are a design tool - asking about the end-user's opinion of persnoas in my mind is akin to asking them if I should run an agile or waterfal development shop. There is no context or reason for the end user to know or care to have an opinion.
I am trying to read between the lines here but, if by surveying customers you mean surveying them to try and have them self-select and identify to which persona they match, I think that is even more problematic, because you have personas, not market segments, which could be used to group people according to certain attributes - personas on the other hand are not, in my experience, relevant as a method to categorize groups of existing users - market segmentation is good for that and that is its reason for existing as an approach.
The best measure of the usefulness and appropriateness of personas in my mind is in how well they aid designers in doing their job. If your designers can express how helpful they are being and what flaws or gaps they encounter as they use them, that would be, to me, the best actionable feedback you could get.
Angela Colter wrote:
I'm hoping to find out if anyone else on the list has done this. We're currently in the middle of a persona development project. One of the leaders of the project has expressed a desire to validate the personas. In other words, conduct a survey of our user base to find out whether the characteristics illustrated in the personas match our actual users. The personas were developed based on field research with about two dozen customers. I think the goal is to survey a much larger proportion of our users to make sure the team got it right. Has anyone surveyed your customers to validate personas? Do you have any advice on doing so that you'd be willing to share?
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