Pre-conference workshop

Guerilla personas & the gentle art of design defense

Lorelei Brown

Holy cow! The company is in crisis and wants to redesign the homepage to address key business issues in the next 30 days. How can we advocate for users, determine when we’re successful, and stop naysayers from derailing the meeting?

Personas are a key tool to help stakeholders understand how to match business goals to user needs. For maximum credibility we need to back our personas with real data & research. It would be great if we could do field research and lots of user interviews, but we’ve got 30 days and no money! We need to do quick, cheap research with dense results.

If there’s no money, and no time, you’ll need to go guerilla, hunting and gathering what you can, as fast as possible! We can get important information on traffic, behaviors, and opinions with free or low-cost tools. There are huge sets of Internet usage and user research available to tap into to augment what you can gather.

Finally, we’ll get to the hard problem: presenting and defending your personas. We’ll outline how to present key information to stakeholders, how to counter common objections, and emphasize what’s most important for those with short attention spans.

By the end of four hours, attendees will:

• Stretch the boundaries of personas to set a strategic vision for a project
• Learn to use personas and research to set metrics and goals
• Feel out which pieces of information are likely to resonate with decision-makers
• Get practice and coaching on presenting in high-pressure situations

This workshop is most appropriate for those with some experience with personas.