How To Create Actionable Personas
Personas are an incredibly valuable tool in the UX Design process—when done right. That’s right, there’s a caveat.
All too often in practice, personas aren’t done right. Many a time, they devolve into a theatrical step in the design process. Even worse, badly done personas can be fantasy at worst and speculation at best—both of which are harmful for the design process. And then, there are the problems that occur after said personas are created. Sometimes, they’re treated as just a deliverable on a checklist, and teams don’t actually use them. Or, their utility isn’t understood, and therefore, they are seldom leveraged.
Personas are only truly useful when they are informative for the design process. Effective personas need to extract the empathetic need that your design needs to fulfil in order to create a successful experience for users.
Creating truly useful and effective personas takes nuance, skill and practice. Fortunately, this Master Class webinar with Daniel Rosenberg will get you started with expert help!
You’ll learn:
- How to undertake competent user research that identifies empathetic needs
- The difference between corporate (political) persona theatrics and real usable research results
- How to choose the optimal conceptual approach and actor model to express your findings
- How to make personas that will actual inform the design process, rather than be ignored
With the help of Daniel Rosenberg’s expertise, your personas can play a central role in product strategy and help guide your design team’s decisions towards new levels of excellence.
When your personas demonstrate value, you’ll find it easier to advocate for their use, or build buy-in for them across teams and levels in the organization.
Even if you cannot attend the webinar live, register to get access to a recording that you can watch anytime afterwards!
Speaker
Daniel Rosenberg is the 2019 recipient of the SigCHI Lifetime Practice Award for his combinations of technical and leadership contributions to the field over the past 40+ years.
Currently, he is a UX consultant and an adjunct professor of HCI at San Jose State University. He serves on the advisory board of the Interaction Design Foundation and for 5 years edited the “Business of UX” Forum in ACM Interactions magazine.
Dan invented many of the standard GUI design patterns we use today during the early days of the software industry, when he worked as a User Interface Architect for Ashton-Tate & Borland. These include the first GUI Integrated Development Environment, defining the workspace style UX for programming and creative tools. He invented Tabs as a UI mechanism and also designed the first GUI administration UX while he was the UX VP at Oracle.
Over the course of his career, Dan has introduced many UX methods that are now common practice. Documented examples include coauthoring the Rapid Prototyping chapter in the first Handbook of HCI (Elsevier 1988). At a CHI1988 special session he introduced the UX community to the concept of GUI look and feel as an integral part of corporate branding. During this same period, he coauthored Human Factors in Product Design (Elsevier 1991), the first consumer product focused HF textbook which revolutionized both design education and practice for over a decade.
With his book UX Magic, published by IxDF, Dan shares his cumulative knowledge of IxD science, theory and practice in a comprehensive new method that he hopes will once again propel the whole HCI field to greater success.
To learn more about Dan or contact him, visit rCDOUX.com
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