Thanks everyone for all the suggestions, ideas, and tips! Much
appreciated. 

Chris: absolutely agree. We definitely conducted research beforehand,
the workshop was mainly to valide some of the findings and to get
clients more involved. 

Audrey: good idea to let the client listed to the interviews,
there's nothing more powerful than hearing user's frustrations from
the user herself.
Also, the idea of having scales for persona's dimensions is a good
one. I prefer it to having just the extremes - e.g. Privacy
fundamentalist vs. Privacy unconcerned. 

Other people sent me emails suggesting:
- employing collaborative affinity diagramming, 
- using 'nudies' (hand drawn characters) and creating collages from
magazine pictures
- making the clients to use the personas in scenarios (using
storyboards) to help them visualize the user needs, behaviours, and
motivations

On running the workshops
- the workshop can start with an icebreaker - e.g. 'draw the person
next to you'
- design games can be used, Sam Menter sent me a good link on that: 
http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/using-design-games 

And seems like the book 'The Persona Life Cycle' by Adlin and
Pruett is a must-read on the subject. 

Finally, the key takeaway with regards to personas seems to be not
cutting corners on user research, but making sure it has been done
thoroughly and rigorously. 

...
Our workshop went well, the biggest success was that we really
managed to get the client reps involved in the project much more, and
that they spent time thinking about the real users. They also seemed
to have enjoyed the workshop, and I hope our relationship with them
has been strenghtened. 

Thanks again
Jan



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Posted from the new ixda.org
http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=46648


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