I recently carried out a persona workshop for my team. With the help of our research team, we posted 5 user personas for our web site on the walls of the training room and asked the team to comment on what we had created.
Personas are people profiles (in our case web site users) which have been created by our research team. They are not real in the sense that they actually exist, but rather they have been created from what we know about types of users from our research.
So, we presented 5 types of people to the team. The profiles included a picture of the person(a), what they did in their spare time, what they did at work, what info they need from the media etc.
Asking the team to comment on these profiles proved to be a very useful experience. Everyone was engaged with the personas and scrawled notes on them.
The aim of the workshop was to engage the team with our users and to give the users a name and a face - turn them into real people.
I am currently looking at the feedback. The next step is to give the updated personas back to the team and get lifesize cutouts made up so we can have our users dotted around the office and so we can 'take them' to meetings. That way we keep our users top of mind.
This was a very useful and successful workshop.