I saw this article about Eeva Ilama’s experience at a Cooper seminar and thought her insights on personas worth sharing. Thanks Eeva!
Cooper, co—founded by industry giant Alan Cooper and his wife Sue, is a leading user experience and service design consultancy based in San Francisco. The company helps businesses uncover product, service and business opportunities and offers training in topics such as product and service design, brand strategy and leadership. When Eeva Ilama, a Senior Interaction Designer at Tango Me attended their workshop on personas, she came away with a clearer understanding and new strategies for developing her own personas. This article is Eeva’s first hand account.
After having attended some of Cooper’s highly reputable interaction and visual interface design courses a few years back, I was beyond thrilled when I saw that UX Booth was offering a free ticket to one of their San Francisco—based readers to one of Cooper’s brand new courses called Putting Personas to Work.
The course was targeted towards user experience practitioners and the challenges they face at their workplaces when trying to apply personas to their product design and development processes. Though personas are an awesome design tool, we all agreed that they often get a bad rap. For example:
- There is confusion about the differences between different types of personas (marketing vs. design personas)
- There are misconceptions about how personas originate (the most accurate and convincing personas are based on actual field research)
- Poorly constructed personas undermine the credibility of all personas
- Poor communication about personas within an organization
- Lack of clarity around how personas should be used throughout design
- Lack of understanding of how design personas can be used over time
The course agenda was designed to address all these concerns and misconceptions in detail, to provide students with the ammo they need when trying to achieve stakeholder buy—in.
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