1. Tell Me About That: Personas and Storytelling
This half-day workshop will explore ways of using personas throughout a
project – from audience analysis through usability testing. We’ll look at the story
of the personas themselves and learn how to interview a persona or channel one
for a user-centered review. Then we’ll write stories to introduce personas to the
whole product team, explore new design ideas from the persona’s perspective,
or write an open-ended usability scenario. Knowledge of personas is helpful, but
not required for this workshop. Learn how to:
• Write stories for different purposes.
• Create exercises to use on your own projects, like
interviewing personas or writing a quick story to put a
review in context.
• Determine how much (or how little) detail a story
needs to introduce a new design idea.
Whitney Quesenbery is a user experience researcher with a passion
for clear communication. She has worked with organizations such as
the National Cancer Institute, IEEE, Sage, Amtrak, and The Open Uni-
versity on design research and evaluation, and coaches developing
UX teams.
She is past president of the Usability Professional Association
(UPA), an STC Fellow and has served on two national advisory
committees for usability and accessibility. She is the author of
Storytelling for User Experience (with Kevin Brooks), and Global
UX: Design and Research in a Connected World (with Daniel Szuc).
Whitney enjoys meeting people around the world and using
those insights to design products where people matter.