Session Title
Calling all persona “experts” (or, my love / hate relationship with Forrester)
Presenter
Kathy Beymer, Cristin Witcher, Designkitchen
Session Type: Discussion
Let’s face it. We’ve all been creating personas for a long time, and we’ve all read Forrester analyst reports heralding best persona practices. But have you cringed when your analyst-worshiping client tells you that your business customer persona should include the number of pets that person owns? Have you groaned when Forrester praises yet another silly persona room? Have you shuddered when personas tried to pass off client-serving goals such as “Enjoy browsing the client X website” as true user goals?
Should we really be holding ourselves to standards set by an organization that never uses the personas they advocate to actually design something?
The group discussion will start off, uh, with all of our own sins – the mistakes we’ve all made when creating personas, as well as things we’ve learned while creating different levels of personas – role-based, mindset-based, process-based, experience-based, etc.
Then the group will dissect personas one-by-one to highlight key information types – people’s tasks, goals, level in the process, demographics, devices owned, etc. What information have you found most helpful when brainstorming ideas for features and content? What information has helped you best design flows and interactions?
Kathy and Cristin will showcase a plethora of persona examples gathered from a number of talented practitioners to fuel discussion. And be sure to bring your own personas too – the good, the bad, the ugly. This discussion can help personas go back to being empathetic design tools rather than “check-off-the-list” often-abused, often-useless deliverables. We’re all the persona experts. Let’s take the power back.
Biography
About Kathy Beymer, Director of User Experience at Designkitchen
Kathy luckily fell into the user experience field at Andersen Consulting (now Accenture) after graduating with the terribly useful degree of Psychology and Management from DePauw University. In her past 15 years in the field she’s happily watched the wave of user-centeredness swell, from relying on stakeholders to say what customers want (oof), to seeing geek-only phrases “usability” and “user friendly” enter mainstream lexicon, to recent focus on creating cross-channel experiences that delight. A passionate user-centered client consultant her entire career, she’s really not as bitter about personas as it sounds.
About Cristin Witcher, Senior User Experience Designer at Designkitchen
Cristin has been writing personas, both good and admittedly very bad, since 2001. First with Accenture, then ThoughtWorks and now Designkitchen Cristin is dedicated to helping companies create engaging user experiences for their customers. Her favorite part of her work is when she’s lucky enough to design moments (online and off) that feel really special. If Forrester were writing her persona they would point out that she lives in Chicago, is married, and has a dog.
6 Comments
Sounds great – would be really nice if people also brought their own personas to compare.
Would be interesting to hear what people found to be the most beneficial persona deliverables, and of course the worse.
A great topic! I would hope the conversation would extend to what participants do with the persona deliverables they create. In particular, what works best at helping the broader team gain empathy for the users? Like any other documentation we produce, personas are just dead trees and petroleum unless the team embraces them.
Would love to hear what others do to recognize their own biases and values when creating personas, and how they overcome them. Personas that are too much like their creators helps us sympathize with the personas, but not necessarily empathize with them.
Hope this gets picked. I’m curious to see the examples that Kathy & Cristin pulled together. I hope people will be open and bring their own as well.
Sadly the persona work I’ve done is entirely proprietary but I cannot count the number of times criticisms of analyst firms like Forrester have produced identical conversations.
It’s time for this discussion.