Whether you call them user archetypes, profiles, target customer characterizations, or personas, creating abstract representations of users can be a powerful device for improving users' experiences with your products and services. Yet even though the buzz around personas just keeps increasing, it's hard to find specific, how-to information for creating and employing personas.

Personas are a powerful technique for keeping a focus on users throughout the design process. Exactly because they are so powerful, personas are also dangerous: if you have the wrong personas, you will get the wrong design, and your project will fail.

This workshop teaches a proven method for defining accurate personas descriptions based on your actual customers. The workshop has a strong hands-on component, where we use your own design project as the running case study for all the exercises throughout the workshop.

The workshop results in a new set of personas that you can use and grow during the rest of your current project.

After this workshop, you will have learned the skills to develop your own personas for future projects and you will never have to pay us a dime again.

Logistics

If you have multiple design projects, the personas will usually be different for each project, and we can only develop one set of personas in a two-day workshop. You should pick one project as the case study, and we will develop personas for this project during the workshop. Representatives from other projects should participate in the workshop with the understanding that they will have to develop their own personas later, using the methods they have learned while working on the project that's the focus of the workshop.

This is the event breakdown:

• Day 1
  • Understanding users, tasks and environment
    • Exercise - identify your user types
  • Describing users using real data
  • Identify data sources
    • What is good data/bad data
    • Impartiality
  • Exercise - list existing data sources within the company
    • Helpdesk info
    • Market research segmentation studies, etc.
    • Marketing
    • Tech writing style guide
    • Bug database
    • Product planning and business goals
  • Exercise - list data sources outside the company
    • Good research sites, free and paid
  • Persona creation from data
    • Process of sifting data to create personas
    • Levels of data to collect and share
  • Educating co-workers
    • How to publicize personas
      • Different media for different uses
      • Incorporating personas in documentation
• Day 2
  • Creating the personas for your own project (half-day)
  • Persona validation
    • Why personas work, and why this can be dangerous
    • Finding real versions of your personas
  • Risks of personas
    • Persona re-use
    • Unmanaged persona growth
    • Not retiring personas in time
    • Persona mania
  • How to use your newfound personas
    • Product planning
    • Design explorations
    • Common language in specs and design meetings
    • Feature prioritization
    • Usability study and focus group recruitment
    • Communicating to development partners
    • Creating more realistic QA/test cases

Before the workshop, our personas specialist will have a telephone call with a representative from your team to discuss sources of data in your organization, so that you can retrieve as much data as possible and have it ready for use during the hands-on exercises.

This seminar is very intensive and should ideally be limited to about 10 people.

Who Should Attend?

• Project manager
• Marketing/Sales
• Market research
• Product management
• Development leads and/or senior engineers
• Technical writers
• Usability engineers
• Interaction designers
• Graphic designers, Web designers
• Information architects
• Quality Assurance

Some companies may not have all of these roles, and sometimes one person can represent multiple perspectives. However, it's important to have a diversity of team members in the workshop, including both customer-facing roles and people who will be doing the hands-on design and development.

Outcomes

• The participants will have learned the skills necessary to develop their own personas for other projects in the future.
• A set of persona definitions for your current design project.
• Giving your design team an understanding of the correct way to utilize their new personas during the rest of the project.
• Increased awareness about usability across the organization because of the team-building experience of participating directly in a usability project.

Thus, you can pay for the seminar out of your training budget or your development budget as you prefer: this is both a learning experience and a way to improve the user experience of your next design.

Pricing Details

• The price for this seminar within the United States is $16,000 plus travel expenses.
• Prices in other countries are higher.

How to Order

Please contact Nielsen Norman Group at info@nngroup.com if you are interested in more information or would like to request this workshop. Note that availability of our senior staff is highly variable: usually we need at least one month's notice. If you need the workshop on a specific date or if international travel is involved, three months' notice would be preferable.