Kieron Leppard

Fri 20 May, 2016, 14:00

SPONSORED BY SAPIENTNITRO: The Death (and Rebirth) of the Persona

Empathy is at the heart of creating impactful customer experiences. But all too often, customer-centric solutions are designed for hyper-rational stereotypes. Or worse still, are a jumble of nonsensical characteristics which fail to resemble any human being.

We believe that the persona as we know it is becoming obsolete. We have more access to data and quant insight than ever before – but it just tells us what people do. It doesn’t help us understand how they feel, what they desire, or even fear. Perhaps biometric information will give us more insight into what people really feel… But at the moment we have to trust what people say.

So we set ourselves the challenge of redesigning the persona to better reflect what it is to be human. And now we want to share it with you:

• Starting wth a mindful mediation, we’ll learn how to become aware of our personal preconceptions and identify biases towards the audiences we design for.
• We’ll critique the ‘vanilla’ persona and present some ideas of personas that we believe do a better job than anything we’ve seen in the industry
• Then participants will be let loose on creating their own multi-sensory persona based on a task we’ll set, which will be presented back to the wider group for assessment.

This interactive workshop shows how combining mindfulness techniques, empathetic listening, and multi-sensory inputs can help us design for the entire human experience – messy, contradictory and emotional.

Please note: if you're attending this session, you should bring... a laptop.