I was given a tour at a client’s office. My eyes caught beautifully drawn user profiles hanging on the wall next to one of the software teams. “What are those?” I asked my guide, the development manager. “Don’t worry about it, Pavel. It is some marketing crap,” he replied – that team apparently didn’t use them.
We learnt that personas are an important technique to get your teams to think of the end users, but that team found them boring and impractical. As in many other organisations, the user profiles were generic pseudo-people no one cared about.
What if instead of having a boring ‘Senior Citizen’ persona we talked about Jacob Zuma, and instead of a ‘Young Mom’ we imagined Kim Kardashian? Extreme personas help us innovate and give us a new thinking angle. Join me for an interactive workshop where we explore how drug dealers use Outlook and Justin Bieber books his flight tickets.