Personas and Female Mindstyles

This year I did one of my biggest projects on how to compile and communicate user insights from consumer research together with quantitative research on women. It was a challenging project with international, interdisciplinary teams and one goal: to bring it all together – aspirational personas (the brand point of view) and reality personas (based on quantitative and qualitative research).
To communicatie this inside the company to have a better understanding “for whom we work” there were 100 copies shared internally at my client Veldhoven Group with the brands Sandwich, Stills, Turnover and NoNo. I facilitated all the workshops (including the seasonal briefings), did consulting on personas and the overall design of the persona posters, the female mindstyle posters and this little booklet including tips and tricks why and how to use it. Here a short impression of the work (iPhone video).

The research on female mindsyles was done by Senta: www.senta.com
More info on VeldhovenGroup and their brands: www.veldhovengroup.com

Need help with your persona project?
From time to time I am organizing an open workshop: 
Data storytelling with personas (here the dutch info, but it can also be held in english or german)
 Storytelling mit Daten ganztägiger Zielgruppen Workshop mit Persona

Persona experience in the museum – playing with your expectations

User centered design, service design and persona thinking is thinking of our time and getting more popular. A current example is now in the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven (Netherlands), here a short description from their website:

The fourth and final part of the exhbition programme Play Van Abbe is called The Pilgrim, the Tourist, the Flaneur (and the Worker). The exhibition presents a selection of important works from the museum’s collection together with several special guest artists. You are invited to play a role whilst visiting the museum; the roles are the pilgrim, the tourist, the flaneur and the worker. The pilgrim is focused on the object of art; the tourist on stories; the flaneur on time and the overall museum experience. Finally, the workers are the roles that seek an active confrontation with art and produces new ideas for themselves and others. You can change roles during your visit and experience how artworks appear different.

So if you want to experience persona thinking in a museum context you can do this until august 2011 in Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (see the website)

If you want more inspiration in how personas work in business and design, how you can make and use personas for your company or project you can do a one day workshop to start with. At the moment I am organizing two dutch workshops in Den Bosch (Steedelijk museum) and Amstelveen (Cobra museum). This workshop can also be done as an in-house workshop in english, german or dutch.

More information:
German: Storytelling mit Daten – Persona Zielgruppen-Workshop

Dutch: Data storytelling met persona’s workshop  

The Persona Core Poster – a service design tool

Please note: this is my original blog from the year 2011.

I have developed more human-centred templates and a fresh approach called Music Thinking. You will also find the book The Power of Music Thinking with the explanation of aspirational Persona vs Reality Persona and Target Group vs Quick Profile.

Download The Persona Core Poster

 Because the Persona Core poster was downloaded more than 100.000 times on this blog, I also have included it on the NEW Persona-Workshop.com website, full of information.

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For years I am working with personas from aspirational to reality.

Most of the time, I follow the same basic questions and approaches while developing the personas.

Finally, I found time to design a poster that you can use in workshops and I hope you like it. I post the A3 template here as a PDF under the creative commons licence, this means you can print it, use it and even change it, just name the source.
Tip: start with behaviour and end with the quote!

If you like it drop me a note and share it with your friends or client.

On a regular basis, I am also conducting workshops in the Netherlands or Germany.

Download The Persona Core Poster

Direct link to the … more information on persona page on The Persona Workshop website.
Check it out, there is a lot of information!

The Persona Workshop

More information on Data Storytelling with Personas via the Creative Companion websiteworkshop:

• in Dutch: Nederlands | Data storytelling met persona’s workshop
• in German: Deutsch | Storytelling mit Daten, ganztägiger Persona Zielgruppen Workshop

More posts on persona thinking:
Personas and female mindstyles
Persona Experience in the Museum – Playing with your Expectations
Persona Experience in the Museum – Playing with your Expectations

How to make better personas for design

 

Christof Zürn
CREATIVE COMPANION
www.creative-companion.com

Download:   CREATIVE COMPANION Fact sheet