Zombie Personas

Stefan — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 19:00:44 +0000

This is by far the nerdiest episode we ever did, so fasten your seat belts. In his session at UXcamp, Tom said: "Personas – love ‘em or hate ‘em – you can’t not use ‘em. Either you have zombies, or you have living ones." In this recording of his session he talks about different kinds of zombies like Mirror Personas, Undead Personas, Unicorn Personas or Stupid User Personas. He gives advice on how to avoid these fellas and how to make good use of living personas during a project. As a bonus, Tom explains why 37signals doesn’t need personas at all.

Links for this episode:

Slides of Tom’s Zombie Persona talk
Another presentation by Tom icludes more info about the Target Persona Exercise and Story Cards
The book "About Face 2" by Alan Cooper (current edition is "About Face 3")
The book "The Inmates are running the Asylum", also by Alan Cooper
The New York Times article about the use of personas by the Ford Motor Company: "Before Creating the Car, Ford Designs the Driver"
37signals, makers of Basecamp and Backpack

Listen:

UXcamp Europe 2010

Stefan — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 23:39:58 +0000

Note: This is a special, hour-long episode entirely in English. We’d like to thank the organizers of UXcamp Europe 2010 as well as all the attendees who made UXcamp such a great event. Spread the word about UXcamp and see you all next year!

End of May, 400 UX pros from all over Europe came together in Berlin to discuss User Experience and exchange knowledge. Volker Gersabeck and Henning Grote, two of the organizers, answered all the curious questions by Holger, Tom and Stefan: How the idea for UXcamp was born, what they had to organize upfront, what the BarCamp spirit is like, and what feedback they’ve got from sponsors and attendees.

Links for this episode:

UX Camp Europe 2010 Sponsors
XING profiles of both Volker Gersabeck and Henning Grote
uxcampeurope.org – the Mixxt site where you can register and read all about the camp.
Session Grid for this year’s UXcamp
Follow twitter.com/uxcampeurope for the latest news about next year’s conference
UPA – the UPA conference which took place in Munich the week prior UXcamp.
#uxce10 is the hashtag for UXcamp, e.g. for images on Flickr and presentations on Slideshare.
UXcamp sponsors mentioned in this episode: Humboldt University (Institute of Psychology), Centigrade, Designerdock, Melt, Tobii
Fjord Open Doors by Fjord Berlin
TED conference
SurveyMonkey

Listen:

UX Café » uxcampeurope2010

Zombie Personas

UXcamp Europe 2010