Kieron Leppard

Creative Director, Experience Design at SapientNitro

Workshop
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.

About Kieron Leppard

At heart Kieron is an experience designer and a lover of all things digital. After having worked at American Express, Foviance/Seren, FortuneCookie/POSSIBLE and Conchango, he joined SapientNitro in 2010. As Experience Design Director he co-leads the Experience Design domain whose purpose is to help brands break boundaries at the intersection of story and technology.

In the last 12 months he has worked for SapientNitro in New York and London for clients like Ferrari, Saks Fifth Avenue, British Airways & RBS and picked up numerous awards along the way.

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