Persona Empathy Workshop

Personas are one of the most popular tools in user research, and are a great way to create shared understanding about users. But they are useless unless people know what they are and how to utilize them.

Designed for research or user-focused teams who want to help others in their organization understand the value and importance of customer personas, this 1-hour 20 minute workshop agenda is highly focused step by step process that is simple and easy to run.

• You'll demonstrate the power of personas and how preconceptions about users and customers are often incorrect.
• Your team will gain some of the tools necessary to better empathize with users and employ personas across the organization
• You'll generate ideas on how to solve problems and meet the needs of your chosen customer persona

This workshop is intended for groups and organizations that are already using or start to use customer personas and who are trying to extend the understanding and use of personas across an organization. You may run this with participants in less user-focused parts of the organization, or to begin demonstrating the value of personas to your team in a concise, effective way.

Tips for running this workshop online

• Pick an online whiteboard tool that allows you to use a large, zoomable canvas.

• If you’re not using an online whiteboard, we’d recommend using a collaboration tool such as Google Docs to collect the information for each step under a separate heading. Invite everyone into the document to share their ideas but be very clear in regards to editing rights.

• When facilitating group discussion, we’d recommend that participants use non-verbal means to indicate they’d like to speak. You can use tools like Zoom’s nonverbal feedback tools, a reaction emoji, or just have people put their hands up. The facilitator can then invite that person to talk.
  

• Use built-in dot voting tools or allocate dot shapes manually in your online whiteboard tool for the voting section. If using Google Docs or similar, have people comment to indicate a vote.