Understanding your users is the core principle of user-centered design. But how do you get from user data to excellent user experiences? User “personas” offer an excellent method for accomplishing this.

User personas are fictitious, yet realistic and detailed descriptions of target users that help you encapsulate complex data into a useful format that can be easily consumed and embraced by your development team.
In this tutorial, you’ll learn techniques for using personas as a tool to help you make critical product decisions and inspire design throughout the development process. You’ll leave this session with the skills needed to use personas to solve problems and inspire creativity in your own organizations and processes.

Please note: This session does not cover how to create personas.

Benefits

• Learn how to implement personas during the product planning, design, development, and release processes
• Get techniques for designing key experiences for your target users using practical, easy-to-implement methods
• Get tips on how to encourage your team to use personas effectively toward design and development

Topics covered

• Collecting and analyzing user data to drive product planning
  • Data in software: Where it comes from and what we do with it
  • Methods for translating data into information (e.g., personas, user profiles and archetypes, scenarios, and case studies; summaries of field research and use cases)
• From data to design: New methods for using data in feature generation and definition
  • Where feature requirements come from
  • Persona-driven competitive analysis: Evaluating the competition through your personas’ eyes to identify key opportunities
  • Persona-driven brainstorming: Generating product and feature ideas based on deep knowledge and key users
• Managing feature madness: Using data to plan and scope your product
  • Extracting and prioritizing feature lists
  • Persona-weighted feature matrix for prioritizing features
• Exploring design ideas for your product with user data
  • Translating features into scenarios
  • Writing a good scenario
  • Design mapping: Sticky notes to create, iterate, and improve user experiences
  • Design maps to design: Site mapping and wireframing for communication
  • Design mapping for creating a new end-to-end experience for a persona
  • Aesthetic choices driven by data: Mood boards and style explorations
• Maintaining focus on data throughout the design and development process
  • The scenario collection spreadsheet: Assessing the relative importance of features and functions
  • Using personas (or user profiles) to evaluate your design: Personas and usability-test participant recruiting, using personas to report test findings
• Time permitting, we’ll discuss your projects and specific ideas to help you “hit the ground running

Format

The basis of the course is a lecture format with a couple group exercises to reinforce the learned principles and guidelines. There will be plenty of opportunities to ask questions and get answers.