UXDX Community:USA Series: UX Process

Your team could spend years crafting and adapting the most effective design process imaginable. However, no matter how tried and true your process may become, it will always fall short of your best work if it lacks one key element: humility. When designers build their process on a foundation of humility—elevating the needs, perspectives, and gifts of others above their own—we will finally produce the kind of work that truly makes us proud. But practicing humility can be hard to do in our fast-paced, results-driven, me-centered industries. In this talk, we'll begin by exploring how me-centered thinking can infiltrate our design process, concluding with a self-evaluation. We'll then continue to see how humility can transform the way we research, ideate, and design. Finally, we'll walk away with practical steps on how you and your team can introduce humble, human-centered decision making into each step of your design process.

Personas are used as a common framework to synthesize user research and crate a starting for setting design requirements. They are intentional amalgamations of user attributes which can be useful, but also have limitations and, at their worst, lead to stereotypes and flawed correlations.

This talk is about analyzing the existing structure of user personas to know when they're useful and re-evaluating how the current components of personas implies assumptions with set behaviors, demographics, and goals. We'll analyze the typical user persona structure and look at case studies where we re-imagine the persona framework to better match several different project contexts. Lastly, we'll walk through principals to guide the audience in how they can apply these techniques to creating better personas as part of their research and design approach.