All right. This video, what we're gonna do is we're gonna talk about  how to run a group to, um, to get your personas. So what you don't wanna do is do it yourself  and then deliver them to people, because nobody is gonna  take ownership of them if you've just kind of handed them up  and told them, this is what you should be thinking. Okay? What you wanna do is, it doesn't have to be long. It doesn't have to be, uh, you know, crazy organized.

It can take half an hour, an hour in the boardroom,  pretty ad hoc, okay? It doesn't have to be super special,  but what you need to do is you need  to get buy-in from the stakeholders, okay? The people that are gonna be, uh, you know,  investing their time in helping you. So it might be, uh, management might be the boss,  it might be the developer, it might be the graphic designer,  whoever's actually gonna be involved, the copywriter, okay? And what you do is you finally get to use post-it notes. We've come along and there's so many videos,  and you've not seen a post-it note,  and you're like, this is not a UX course.

I'm sure there was post-it notes. So we've got some post-it notes. Now. So what happens is, uh, you facilitate it, okay? And you ask pe you give, uh, you know,  you could take the notes on the post-it notes,  and what you do is you say, you know, you describe,  you talk about the product that you're gonna be building,  or the thing or the feature, okay? And then you ask the group,  and you might have to jog everybody, get everybody started,  but you ask people who are the kinds of people  that might be using it?

Um, and what you do is you might have to facilitate it  and kind of get it going, but  after a while, I've run lots of these groups  where people start after a little while. I go like, oh, okay, what about, um, let's say it's for,  let's just pretend a mock exercise,  and then I'm doing it for my course. I, I, I released a course  for HTML five banner ad advertising. Okay? So, um, let's say we did it as a group,  and I'd suggest something simple like, okay, you know, the,  the types of people are probably from my experience are,  you know, um, say it's a girl. She's in her early thirties,  and she used to do flash the old banner ad stuff,  and now is kind of trying to get back into it.

And so you write down just the basics. You say, give her a name. And that's kind of the fun part, is you give her, you say,  um, she is designer Danielle,  and she is 30, uh, you know, early thirties,  and she's moving back and say, and you just  write it down, okay? And then stick it to your wall or whiteboard. Okay? That's the fun stuff.

Sticking it to the whiteboard, okay? Then you ask somebody else,  and somebody else might say, oh, it's actually, you know,  the type of people might be marketing people. You know, it might be a young guy who's getting into it  and is doing some freelance stuff  and is having to turn down work, but needs to get into it. And you, you know, you write that down and give him a name. He might be, uh, the mike, the marketer, okay? And you stick him up and you go through and you try  and, you know, get everybody going and try  and get something out of everybody.

And once you've got it all, you stick 'em  all up on the wall, okay? With the whiteboard, and you start looking like a  UX designer, okay? And then as a group, okay? What you try and do then is try  and put them into kind of like, you know,  'cause you might have come up with say, 10 of them,  or 20 of them, or 30 of them,  how many, many have you come up with. And then try and kind of like combine them down. You might have some that are really similar, you know,  might, you might find, uh, you know, marketing mark  and, um, you know, um, this other person  that you've made up is actually,  they've got very similar traits, you know, so it'd be hard  to, to find them.

So then what you start doing is you start drawing circles  with the whiteboard, okay. Around a few groups, and you start adding them together. And what you're trying to do is boil it down  to the absolute essentials. Okay? So it might be one person,  it might be two, it might be three. Don't get more than three.

Two's good. Okay? I find two's a nice working  number for a lot of the projects. You might have some bigger projects,  or justifiably have some more,  but those are the kind of numbers. And then what you do is, um,  because I guess the processes, you'll then later on,  write up a more detailed one, add a,  flesh it out a little bit, not too far. Okay?

My personas are always a paragraph, maybe two. Okay? Just so that it's memorable and it's easy. Okay? And, um, I guess what you've gotta make sure is that,  you know, when you're grouping them together,  is you don't really say, you know,  you don't kind of tell people what to do. You're kind of asking it, would these  people kind of be the same?

And you let the group, okay, chat it out, talk it out. Because the idea of this process is not to actually,  you know, get a persona. It's mainly so that people can chat about it, talk about it,  and kinda work through the details in their own heads so  that when they are working on their parts  of the project, remember they're stakeholders. Stakeholders, okay? Is that they are sitting down  and like they've, they've thought through why  that original idea they had maybe isn't as useful now  because they chatted it out and they had discussions. And, you know, a half an hour of thinking  through those problems will save people just later  on if you hand it to them.

And then, then them kind  of like being a bit resilient to it. So that's, remember the idea of the goal is for you  to be a facilitator of getting ideas  and having the chat, even if you use a profiles  that come out aren't perfect. It's not really about that. It's, it's about kind of getting everybody thinking about,  um, you know, the, the pros and cons  and who might be using it so  that when they are doing their work, they are, you know,  they've got a good idea of where you are trying  to head, okay? So once you've got your post-it notes all up  and you're drawn on the whiteboard with lots of stuff. And what you need to do then is, uh,  make sure you do it straight away.

Don't go off and build this amazing report. Okay, that looks beautiful, and, you know, you deliver it  and it's all this special thing,  but people have lost the, um, you know, they've lost the,  uh, kind of buzz from it. What you need to do is make sure you do it in the morning  or the kind of early afternoon. So you've got some time afterwards is  to actually draft up a more, you know,  a more complete version. So you, you know, give them a name, add any bits  that you think are really necessary  and kind of, you know, mold it into a, a good user profile. And then email it out to everybody,  print it up, stick it around.

So it's not kind of like, we did this  and then next week we did that. And then, what was that thing we did? Again, you want to kind of just do the, um,  do the task really informally. Uh, print it off, stick it up in the lunchroom,  stick it up in everybody's desks, um, so  that you can get feedback, okay? And so that there's a bit of momentum  and people, when people are working on it, okay,  say they're working on it at that time,  they're actually really to go  and they've kind of, they've clarified  'cause they might go off and start thinking  and things kind of wander a little bit  and you lose that kind of power of that group session. So, yeah, go off, tidy it up,  make it look pretty if you want, add a photo.

I, I sometimes do, I sometimes I find something random  online that fits a, you know,  a 3-year-old female in marketing, okay? And like, I try and stick that in there. Um, but, uh, uh, I go through months where I'm doing it  and then months I don't 'cause it's ridiculous. Okay? So, uh, have a bit of fun with it as well,  but, um, don't get too carried away with that, uh,  user profile at this stage.