Conestoga events

Sometimes a product may not feel quite right for everyone.

For instance, the language used may feel targeted towards a technical person, but the graphical style of the screen may feel juvenile. Personas are a popular tool for helping product development teams avoid these problems.

A persona is a description of a fictional, but realistic, target user of a product. A persona contains information such as the technical background, motivations, and frustrations of the target user. These attributes are typically are a composite of information gathered through research and interviews.

Personas are typically presented as a one-page personal profile complete with photographs and real names. This profile is used as an alignment tool. Product teams are encouraged to constantly reflect on whether their 'persona' would be able to use or even want features in development.

While personas might drive alignment, there is some question of whether they support better design decisions. Personas are sometimes criticized for giving product teams a false sense of user-centricity. Worse, personas are sometimes misleading.

Join us as we start the fourth season of User Experience Guest Lecture Series for this talk to learn about how the User Experience team at D2L created and evangelized a set of enterprise personas, and avoided some of the common pitfalls. Learn about the impact that personas have had on the organization as a whole and see how you might start your own persona effort.

Speaker:

Janna Cameron, Product Design Manager, D2L

Janna helps companies innovate through developing an empathetic understanding of non-articulated customer needs, expectations, and frustrations.

Janna is a serial 'intrapreneur'. She pioneered user research practices at both Research In Motion and D2L. Her work spans a variety of products and platforms, including mobile software and hardware, and Web and traditional desktop applications.

She brings a sense of humor and optimism to her work, encouraging others to join her to make products friendlier for all users.

Janna was first introduced to usability and user research at University of Waterloo, where she studied Systems Design Engineering with a focus on Human-Computer Interaction.

Time:

6:00 PM - 7:00 PM

Location:

Conestoga College, Doon Campus, 299 Doon Valley Drive, Main Building, Room 2A502

To Register:

This guest lecture is free to attend but does require registration. For more information, contact Dalibor Dvorski.