Personas, Profiles, Actors, & Roles: Modeling Users to Target Successful Product Design

This 3 hour tutorial simplifies and demystifies commonly used user models such as personas, user profiles, user roles, and actors. You’ll learn how to simply construct each and leverage them to improve your software.

Leveraging what you understand about your application’s users is central to a user centered design approach. User personas have been touted as solution for improving the quality of user experience. But what exactly is a persona? How doe you create one? And, how does a persona differ from other popular approaches to modeling users such as actors, user roles, or user profiles?

In this tutorial you’ll how user models fit into a holistic user centered design process. You’ll learn about various types of user models. Through discussion and practice you’ll learn how to create simple role models, user profiles, and personas. You’ll learn how to leverage these user models to identify valuable features for your product, and overarching characteristics the design of your product must have to be successful for your target users.

This tutorial is fast paced, information dense, and full of collaborative activities to give you practice with the concepts and techniques introduced.

Personas, Profiles, Actors & Roles by Jeff Patton