Conducting Customer Interviews to Validate Provisional Personas (1/2 day)
In the third edition of Alan Cooper’s book About Face in 2007, Cooper added a new section called “When Rigorous Personas Aren’t Possible: Provisional Personas.” The concept was intended for product makers who did not have the time, budgets, or corporate buy-in to perform the fieldwork necessary to gather detailed qualitative data. Provisional personas are a simple collaborative group exercise for designers and non-designers to quickly depict and align on assumptions about a hypothesized customer segment.
Customer Discovery, advocated by Steve Blank, is a process used to discover, test, and validate whether a specific product solves a known problem for a segment of users. It is essentially a method for conducting qualitative user research. However, you don’t want to merely observe people, empathize with them, and then make judgments. Instead, you want to “get out of the building” and conduct customer interviews with the goal of getting measurable feedback.
This 1/2 day workshop teaches participants exactly how to create a provisional persona and then do interview preparation so that they can apply this approach on their own.
