User Experience Tools: The Complete Guide to Personas

Today, more than ever, businesses need to understand their customers if they want to create brand-defining experiences that differentiate them from the competition. Regardless of your industry or niche, consumer expectations are being shaped by their experience with industry leaders – people expect the convenience of Amazon, the pricing of Walmart, and the experience of Apple.

This course will show you how to understand your customers better – through a tool known as personas. It’s comprehensive, showing you not only why you need to use personas, but giving you a detailed toolbox on how to build them, and how to use them throughout your business.

The course structure can be summarized as:

1. Introduction – learn why customer experience (CX) is becoming a key business imperative, and where personas fit in your CX initiatives
2. What is a persona – learn the history of personas, and today’s thinking around how best to design them
3. Creating personas – learn the most effective tools to perform user research in order to create personas. The Persona Toolbox is introduced, showing you 6 different methodologies, with detailed explanations of all of them
4. Use personas – learn how to use personas throughout your business to enhance customer-centricity. 
5. Success factors and common mistakes – avoid the mistakes we see businesses make when using personas, and discover the key success factors needed to create truly exceptional personas
6. The future of personas – learn how some companies are taking personas to the next level to derive more value for the business and their customers

Templates have been included to allow you to quickly start using these tools. We’ve also included assignments to help you incorporate personas for your specific needs.

All course notes are also available

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The Skills Spotlight series is a collection of courses that help designers master a specific skill that they can use throughout their career. Too often, we find designers that have an incomplete toolkit. In our experience, we see that many good designers are only missing a few essential skills. This series was developed so that intermediate-level designers could improve their skills where it mattered, not wasting time with general courses. Beginner designers can also use the Skills Spotlight series to build a comprehensive base from beginning, or consider doing a flagship course on a particular theme.