Personas in Action

Personas: Persona development, personas, Field Studies, creating and using personas, persona best practices.

This seminar focuses on getting past personas as hype and concentrates on how to develop and use personas on your designs. We will focus on data sources, including tips for gathering and interpreting user data in the construction of personas. This seminar will take 3 real world design contexts (B2C website, B2B web application and product usability) and show you the real world challenges of applying persona data to a design.

Leveraging many years of experience with personas, Frank Spillers, MS will walk you through persona pitfalls and issues and guide you toward an understanding of when/ why/ how and where to apply persona insights to your design. Beyond marketing personas, this seminar will provide you with the knowledge to develop and apply personas to your user experience and design efforts.

Topic: 
The hype over the last decade surrounding personas would have you believe that personas are cartoon characters, abstractions of user profiles…imagined in order to help you think about your customers. Personas are not intangibles. They are not 'shake and bake' customer profiles that the Marketing Department cooks up and expects designers and developers to work with. Instead, personas are living embodiments of user data and represent user behavior, intention and action. Personas are design tools. This seminar shows you how to develop and use personas effectively.

Agenda

1. The politics of customer profiles and personas
2. Where does user data come from?
3. Gathering data: core techniques, tips and techniques
4. Developing your personas
5. Interpreting data and applying it to design
6. Persona pitfalls and cautions
7. Q & A

Who should attend: Designers, Developers, Program or Product Managers; Business Analysts; Research and Development teams