Educational Resources

UXPA-MN recognizes that members like you want to continue to learn and grow within the User Experience practice, and to help you achieve that goal, we've curated a number of items below. In this section, you will find resources that you can read, watch, listen to, or do that we hope expand the breadth and depth of your knowledge of user experience.

This page will be refreshed regularly with new resources around a given theme relevant to multiple roles within the UX discipline. To view resources from a previous month, click here!

Do you have ideas for a future theme or resources you'd like to see covered here?
Contact Mathias Rechtzigel so the UXPA-MN team can review it for inclusion in a future update!

Current Theme: Personas!

Updated: September 2023

As a user experience practitioner, understanding and crafting personas is an essential tool in creating meaningful and effective digital experiences. Personas are vivid, detailed representations of our users, allowing us to humanize data and design with empathy.

By conducting research with people and diving into their behaviors, and motivations of these, we gain invaluable insights that guide our design decisions, ensuring our products and interfaces resonate with real people.

Personas empower us to bridge the gap between user needs and design solutions, enabling us to create user-centric experiences that truly connect and delight. In this exploration of personas, we'll delve into the art and science of persona development, uncovering how this indispensable UX technique can transform the way we design and build for the digital world.

We hope you find some of these resources helpful in your journey in creating personas!

Slides from Behavioral Archetypes Persona Event!

Read

A Closer Look At Personas: What They Are And How They Work by Schlomo Goltz

Personas have been in use since the mid-’90s and since then have gained widespread awareness within the design community. Once Shlomo Goltz understood why personas were valuable and how they could be put into action, he started using them in his own work, and then his process became more efficient and fun, while the fruits of his labor became more impactful and useful to others. Personas will supercharge your work and help you take your designs to the next level.

Personas – A Simple Introduction by Rikke Friis Dam and Teo Yu Siang

This article provides a comprehensive overview of personas in the context of user experience design. It explains that personas are fictional characters created based on research to represent different user types for a service, product, site, or brand. These personas help designers understand user needs, behaviors, and goals, making the design process more user-centric. The article also highlights four different types of personas (goal-directed, role-based, engaging, and fictional) and outlines a 10-step process for creating engaging personas. Additionally, it emphasizes the importance of empathy and storytelling in the design process and provides references for further learning on the topic.

Why Personas Fail By Kim Salazar

Personas are useful tools for UX work, so why do they often fail? Find out what pitfalls cause personas to fail, and how to avoid and overcome them.

Watch

Personas vs Customer Segments vs Jobs to be Done vs... in UX

In this a tad more technical UX video, I'll cover one of the most frequently asked topics in the design community: user target group definition toolkit. Typically in the research and design process demanded for personas, customer segments, empathy maps and jobs to be done (jtbd) aren't all made to serve the same purposes or be used exclusively. Watch the video to understand the underlying need for these tools and how to use them in conjunction to achieve the best user experience outcomes.

How to create user experience personas

In this video, Gregg Bernstein describes how to perform basic user research, turn that research into personas to inform your design decisions, and get everybody in your team on board with using them.

Creating Personas Is Like Sorting Rocks

Analyzing data to identify meaningful segments of users is the most difficult part of persona creation. In this video we'll discuss how to look for similarities in various attributes using something much more straightforward than people: rocks!

Listen

This one is kinda meta, but here's an article that talks about the PERSONAS of USER EXPERIENCE PODCASTS! Personas all the way down 🤣 https://www.researcherxp.com/test-post/

Do you have ideas for a future theme or resources you'd like to see covered here?
Contact Mathias Rechtzigel so the UXPA-MN team can review it for inclusion in a future update!

Looking for an older link or resource?
Check out our archive: Past Educational Resources

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