Great design begins with deep
understanding and
empathy for people’s lived experiences. It requires an ability to put yourself in the shoes of the people who will interact with the solutions you create.
People are complex — and unpredictable. Their behavior may be driven by specific personality traits, but it’s also shaped by external stressors and situations.
Designers have long used personas to construct “user profiles” to inform their work. However, we’ve observed a few problems with the way personas are created. In some cases, the process is a time, labor, and resource-intensive endeavor. In others, it’s a quick, off-the-cuff jam session that results in stereotyped caricatures based on designers’ personal beliefs, biases, and assumptions. And both of these approaches can lead to static personas that aren’t flexible enough to be used for future design work.
In this workshop you’ll get hands-on experience in creating personas that are project-specific, contextual to a person’s life situation, and based primarily on behavior attributes. You’ll hear our rationale for bringing diverse groups of stakeholders and designers together to create personas collaboratively. And, you’ll have an opportunity to try the MPACT methodology for yourself.
Key takeaways:
- Why you can’t create optimal design strategies without understanding your audience
- Why behavior-based personas can be more effective for creating design strategies than demographic-based personas
- How to use the MPACT methodology to develop agile, behavior-based personas
- How to mine behavior attributes from your research
- Plus, access to an MPACT “starter kit” so you can apply this framework in your work
Note: If you can’t join us at HXD, but would like to learn more about Mad*Pow’s persona-building methodology, you can watch our recent webinar. We also have information about MPACT on our website.
