Persona workshops

Fundamentals of personas

A 90-minute overview of the what, why and how of personas.

Suitable for lectures at professional associations, university classes or organizations curious whether personas might be helpful to them. This session can be delivered in person or as a Web seminar.

Getting started with personas

A full-day, hands-on workshop that prepares you to introduce personas in your own practice.

Personas have become a hot topic in design, usability, documentation and marketing. But finding concrete, comprehensive information on how to create and use personas can be difficult, especially on the Web. This workshop satisfies those needs in two ways:

• First, you'll get a clear introduction to personas that demystifies the process and explains how to actually use them (with many examples from actual client projects).
• Second, you'll receive a personal copy of the first-ever authoritative book on the subject, The Persona Lifecycle.

This full-day workshop will prepare you to get started with personas in your own practice. You'll learn how to create personas, how to use them and what to expect from them. Personas are a terrific tool, which have become a best practice for very good reasons, but they're not a magic bullet. And although we'll focus on best-practice methods, we'll also explore their limitations and discuss strategies dealing with absurdly tight timelines and budgets. This is a hands-on workshop, so you'll have the opportunity to practice key steps along the way.

Who is this workshop intended for?

• Anyone who's part of a team building Web sites, Web applications or software applications - and who feels the team would benefit from a clear, shared vision of who they're building it for.
• Practitioners in usability, interaction design, information architecture, technical communication and product management will find the workshop especially valuable.
• Marketing and sales professionals responsible for marketing strategy and messaging.

Putting personas to work

Already have some personas? This interactive workshop puts them to work solving problems and jump-starting innovation for your organization.

The focus of this workshop is to help teams improve their process and results by integrating personas into already existing work-flow processes. For instance, a team that supports the content and design of a corporate Web site may wish to know how personas change the way tasks are conceived, shared, authorized and executed.

Personas can also be integrated with other approaches such as brand experience attributes to achieve stronger differentiation of customer experience - by working on both the dimension of "who" this experience is for and "what" this experience is supposed to mean. This workshop also illustrates how these methods can be combined.

Want to know more?

For more information on our persona services, contact Glen Drummond by email or give him a call at 519.570.2020 or toll-free in North America at 888.570.2020.