Method acting and personas
Zef Fugaz's "Bring Your Personas to Life" is worth a read. It's not enough to simply document our users from afar. To some degree, we must become them, live in their shoes, empathize with their struggles. It's so easy to revert to our instincts of designing for ourselves that it takes something rather odd like role-playing to jolt us into a different perspective. We are not our users, and any tool that shakes us up is a good thing.