Persona Workshop
"Personas are not real people, but they represent them throughout the design process. They are hypothetical archetypes of actual users." - Adam Cooper.
When coming up with ideas for a new product, service, story, or other artefact, that ultimately will be judged by people in the form of users, customers, or audience, it makes good sense to design in a "human centric" way.
Based on your objective, this workshop will help you understand what personas are, why using them, and more importantly guide through the creation process of a persona.
This is a 2,5-hour workshop (the preparation phase of gathering existing data needs to be done beforehand).
Personas can be used for many different things, and as such, many different types or flavors of personas have evolved. However, here are 4 most well-known types of personas and how to use them.
Design Personas
Design personas are used to support product design and service design: They represent users of that product or service, and are grouped together by e.g. the problems they experience, the needs they have, their preferences, and their goals.
They describe the needs of potential users and help developers focus on finding out what solutions benefit users the most.
Used mainly in Service Design, UX Design, interface Design
Buyer (Marketing and Sales) Personas
Buyer personas are used to figure out what types of marketing strategies, channels, and styles should be used to reach potential customers.
Different groups of customers might share certain buying preferences, social relations, modes of consumption, and buying power.
Used mainly in Marketing, Branding, Sales.
Validation Personas
Validation personas are used to support the early stages of the design process for a new product or service. They help map out assumptions you may have about what the product should be, and confront these assumptions with reality. Where traditional design personas are used to figure out design problems in user experience or interface design, personas used for validation are more high level and deal with how people experience a problem.
Used mainly in early stage product or service design, start-ups.
Storytelling Personas
Storytelling personas are used to map out how an audience will respond to a story, presentation, or pitch.
What do they know, think, and feel before they have experienced the story?
What would you like them to know, think, and feel afterward?
Using storytelling personas can help you to figure out how to reach different groups in your target audience that have different perspectives and needs.
Used mainly in presentation design, talks, pitches, etc.