Knowing your target audience and having a customer driven decision making process is one of the most important steps in achieving product/market fit in a startup. But, it is often neglected in creating awesome products through customer development. Therefore, mapping out your users who exhibit similar behavioral patterns and motivations in their use of your product or service can be a very valuable exercise to optimize interaction design and user experience.

Pre-class Warm Up:

• Read You Need Personas
• Read The Value of Personas
• Read From Personas to Functional Specifications
• Download and print: persona template courtesy of Joanna Richardson and Orange Bus

In-class Interaction:

• The focus of this study session is to collectively create user personas from the perspective of someone who works at Twitter
• Collectively 5-6 one-page personas of Twitter users
• Discuss & brainstorm what the important elements to include are, how to obtain the information, and nailing down the purpose of creating user personas

Post-class Takeaways:

• Understanding of the actual process of creating a user persona
• Steps to translating user personas to product development decisions
• Action items for creating user personas pertaining to your own business or project

Class Format: Study session, which will be more focused on student-led collaboration. There will not be a teacher.