Personas in User Interface Engineering

This course is for people with great ideas for software solutions that address other people's challenges but who need advice in materialising these solutions into products or services that actually focus onto the user.

Personas are widely used in marketing but are also highly effective in user interface engineering. As part of the user-centred design (UCD) process and principles, creating personas is great to help generate awareness of the end-user of a system throughout the whole development team as well as across multiple departments or product stakeholders. This helps to increase overall software quality while reducing costs at the same time.

Today, users expect to be able to personalise software to their specific needs and preferences. Mostly, they even expect to experience a user interface that already fits their personal preferences right away and that is able to adapt to changes in their personal requirements. Those highly customisable experiences can only be provided by knowing the user as exactly as possible to even be aware of the specific adaptation opportunities that need to be implemented. This can as well be solved by means of user-centred design and in performing deep user analysis using thoughtful target-group segmentation and analysis. The key instrument for that is to be able to create personas the right way.

People often struggle with systematically creating personas specifically for a single project or even related to a company's product strategy. The incorporation of personas or the user-centred design process into today's development processes seems challenging. Especially for teams following agile software development strategies (including Scrum, Kanban, Externe Programming, etc.) embedding user-minded user interface and UX engineering is occasionally difficult.

This course addresses these challenges and offers straight-forward guidelines to get over the struggle. As a bonus, we take a look onto an ultra-fast technique to create personas to help getting started as quickly as even possible.