User-Centered Design Using Personas

A failure point in developing useful and usable products are user requirements and expectations—understanding who the users are, their goals, actions, motivations, and pain points. Fadi Khoury explains that user-centered design is a product development methodology based on actual user needs, behaviors, abilities, and perceptions. User-centered design is popular because it offers the most effective path to useful and usable products. Combining this design approach with personas—fictional characters, created to represent the different user types that may use a product—is a powerful approach for capturing and managing requirements. Fadi explores how personas put a human face on the amorphous term “user” and save time by focusing development toward real use cases and away from unlikely edge cases. Join this session to learn what a persona should and should not be, the power of empathy, the uses of personas, creating personas, and how to avoid elastic users. Take back new tools to manage user requirements and deliver the most useful and usable products possible.