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 StorytellingforUserExperience (with Kevin Brooks), and GlobalUX:DesignandResearchinaConnectedWorld (with Daniel Szuc).

Whitney enjoys meeting people around the world and using those insights to design products where people matter.