Know Thy User: Persona-Centered Design

Design

When it comes to personas, there's a whole lot of talk in user experience circles, but not always a lot of action. Many people extol the virtues of personas, but few dive into the trenches of how to actually create personas and use them effectively for creating online experiences. This workshop will lead attendees through the entire process, with exercises that bring the theories of personas to life.

We will cover everything from research methodologies and segmentation approaches to making personas real and using them for digital strategy, scope prioritization, information architecture, and design. The workshop will quickly cover the basic principles and components of personas, as well as provide advanced techniques and best practices on topics such as survey design and quantitative segmentation.

We'll answer questions such as:

• What are the steps I follow to create personas quickly on my own?
• How do I get the most out of user research?
• How do I bring more science and rigor to persona creation to assuage my skeptics?
• What are the tricks to making personas truly come to life and be memorable?
• When and how do I use personas when working on digital strategy, information architecture, interaction design, visual design, and user testing?

Workshop activities will involve exercises to uncover the best approaches for creating persona segmentation and bringing personas to life.

Whether you design or build, strategize or architect, the targeted audience should be foremost in your mind. This workshop will help you and your team make your audience come alive so you can build better online experiences for them.

By the end of this workshop you will be able to:

• Understand and communicate the value of personas
• Decide among the various approaches for creating personas
• Know when to apply which user research methods
• Get the most out of conducting user interviews
• Master the art of qualitative segmentation for persona creation
• Enhance persona creation with quantitative research such as surveys
• Graduate to a more data-driven segmentation approach through cluster analysis
• Know all of the critical elements of an effective, memorable persona
• Create a variety of tools and documents for socializing personas in your organization
• Apply personas to feature and content brainstorming and prioritization
• Guide information architecture, design, and user testing with personas