Using Personas in Ideation Workshops

DS 86: Proceedings of The Fourth International Conference on Design Creativity,Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA

Year: 2016
Editor: Julie Linsey, Maria Yang, and Yukari Nagai
Author: Florian, Rittiner; Johannes, Heck; Mirko, Meboldt; Martin, Steinert
Series: ICDC
ISBN: 978-1-904670-82-7

Abstract

We show how the persona methodology can be successfully applied to promote usercentricity
in short-term ideation workshops. For this research, we observed 20 teams of Swiss
Small and Medium-sized Enterprises during 2.5-days standardized ideation workshops. We
studied how they developed and used 81 personas as a design tool to inform their product and
service development activities. We found that an iterative approach in combination with a multidisciplinary
team that combines a broad range of expertise and experiences may compensate for
the limited amount of time that is available for user research in workshop settings.

Keywords: Persona, ideation, prototyping, workshop, new product development and design