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Personas and User Research: Design Products and Services People Need and Want

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How This Course Will Help Your Career

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    Top designers earn top salaries because they do  more than just design; they solve real problems   for real people. How? The easy way: with  personas and user research. Personas turn   messy research into a crystal-clear picture of  who you're designing for. They give teams focus,   simplify decisions, and keep people at the  heart of every choice. The result? Products,   services, and experiences that your users truly  need and love. More love means more profits for   the company and higher salary potential  for you. Master these in-demand skills,  

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    and you'll show hiring managers exactly  what they want. I'm William Hudson. I've   been building interactive systems since  the early 1970s and have broad experience:   lots of software writing, lots of user experience  work. In this course, you'll get bite-size videos,   step-by-step templates, and hands-on activities  that will enrich your portfolio. Enroll now, and   you'll have all the tools and confidence to start  using personas right away. Let's get started!

In this course, you will

  • Get excited to create products, services, and experiences people actually love—without the guesswork. Personas grounded in research will help you move beyond assumptions and craft experiences that truly delight. Expanding requirements cause 47% of projects to overspend, launch late, or fail altogether. One additional feature turns into five, and before you know it, the project is unrecognizable—packed with things no one asked for. When you design for a persona, you get to focus on what truly matters and solve the real problems people have. Fewer problems, more smiles—more smiles, more profit.

  • Make yourself invaluable when you can transform raw research into powerful personas that turn ideas into user-centered solutions that smash business goals and improve people’s lives. AI can’t replace these timeless, human-centered skills, and you will become the go-to expert on your team who can communicate user needs with confidence and help customers get what they truly want. With design personas, you’ll make smarter decisions, keep everything—and everyone—on track, and drive your team and projects to success.

  • Gain confidence and credibility as you learn the simple step-by-step method to create effective personas—complete with templates that turn knowledge into real-world results. Get to grips with observations, triangulation, and grounded theory, distill your findings with affinity diagrams, and pour it all into personas that work. Access real user research in the optional course project, and bring your new skills to life with a portfolio piece that’ll open up exciting and fulfilling career opportunities.

You’ll Learn from the Best

In this course, you’ll learn from one of the world’s leading experts:

  • William Hudson: User Experience Strategist and Founder of Syntagm Ltd.

Gain an Industry-Recognized UX Course Certificate

Use your industry-recognized Course Certificate on your resume, CV, LinkedIn profile or your website.

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Our courses and Course Certificates are trusted by these industry leaders:

Our clients: IBM, HP, Adobe, GE, Accenture, Allianz, Phillips, Deezer, Capgemin, Mcafee, SAP, Telenor, Cigna, British Parliament, State of New York

Why Learn About Personas and User Research?

Personas fit under the umbrella term of “User Experience (UX) Design.” UX Design is a broad field that encompasses many disciplines. As the name suggests, “User Experience Design” is when you design the experiences that a user/customer has with your product or service, whether it's navigating a website/app, receiving customer support, or walking through a physical store.

That’s why UX Design is valuable in any industry, any job.

UX Design Is Booming: Your Path to a High-Paying and Meaningful Career

Salaries for people who learn User Experience (UX) design are soaring, surpassing $200K in cities like San Francisco, with global job growth rates at 13%. Why? Because happy customers and users are the backbone of any business success. Skills in UX design empower you to find out what your users need and how to craft enjoyable solutions to their problems. It’s deeply meaningful to design experiences that make people’s lives easier.

Great Design Drives Business Success and Improves Lives

You can benefit from the practical skills of UX design in most jobs and most companies. Even if you’re not a designer. That’s because UX design helps people reach their goals and meet their needs. Your design skills can help increase sales, keep customers loyal, and turn them into powerful advocates of your brand.

Advance Your Career with Practical UX Design Skills

You already have UX design skills—more than you think! Our ready-to-use downloadable templates will help you sharpen and apply them fast. You’ll learn what hiring managers look for in your portfolio and in you as an applicant. You can transition into a career in UX design or apply your new skills immediately in your current job.

Course Overview: What You'll Master

  • Each week, one lesson becomes available.
  • There's no time limit to finish a course. Lessons have no deadlines.
  • Estimated learning time: 9 hours 58 mins spread over 6 weeks .

Lesson 0: Welcome and Introduction

Available once you start the course. Estimated time to complete: 1 hour 48 mins.

Lesson 1: Personas: Why They Work and What People Get Wrong

Available once you start the course. Estimated time to complete: 1 hour 45 mins.

Lesson 2: User Research for Personas: How to Truly Understand Your Users

Available anytime after Apr 25, 2025. Estimated time to complete: 1 hour 31 mins.

Lesson 3: Affinity Diagrams: How to Find Patterns That Shape Effective Personas

Available anytime after May 02, 2025. Estimated time to complete: 1 hour 52 mins.

Lesson 4: How to Build Personas That Give Focus and Get Used

Available anytime after May 09, 2025. Estimated time to complete: 3 hours 1 min.

Lesson 5: Course Certificate, Final Networking, and Course Wrap-up

Available anytime after May 16, 2025.

How It Works

  1. Take online courses by industry experts

    Lessons are self-paced so you'll never be late for class or miss a deadline.

  2. Get a Course Certificate

    Your answers are graded by experts, not machines. Get an industry-recognized Course Certificate to prove your skills.

  3. Advance your career

    Use your new skills in your existing job or to get a new job in UX design. Get help from our community.

Start Advancing Your Career Now

Join us to take “Personas and User Research: Design Products and Services People Need and Want”. Take other courses at no additional cost. Make a concrete step forward in your career path today.

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Personas and User Research: Design Products and Services People Need and Want
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hrs
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Personas and User Research: Design Products and Services People Need and Want

1.2 - Personas: What They Are and Why They Matter

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    Why personas? Why do we introduce these fairly  unusual features into our design process?  And the answer is, we don't naturally do user-centered design. If you are in user experience design or   user-centered design, that may sound a little  unusual to you, but still, the vast majority   of systems do not really focus on users in the  way that we need them to.  Personas are a way to get that focus, and they really are very much about focus.

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    And some of the anomalies in the descriptions of personas over really the past 20 or more years, since they were introduced, have kind of muddied that water.  They've led us away from, the true point. We're going to be talking about the problems  that we have with, low awareness of users.   I teach software engineering courses, and they are  just now starting to have a little content about  

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    usability, but still, nothing about user research  and how you decide how to design a system in   terms of making it suitable for its intended audience. So, there really isn't any understanding   of who the users are, what they need, and how they  work. We still do see a lot of references to roles.   Roles in organizations are fantastically  problematic because often the people who are in  

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    those roles don't even understand them fully,  yet we're using them in software development   to try to describe the needs of a user.  I'm afraid it's a little bit nonsensical.  And in a lot of cases, we have a very strong  technology focus. This can be within a team or within an entire organization. If you're working within an engineering organization, for example,  the idea that the engineers should be going out  and talking to others to decide what they should  

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    build is moderately unusual in many instances.  So, that is a pretty big issue in terms of,   the absence of users and the avoidance, almost by definition, of user-centered   design. If you don't know anything about the  users, you cannot do user-centered design.

Personas and User Research: Design Products and Services People Need and Want

2.2 - Grounded Theory: Base Findings on Research, Not Preconceptions

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Personas and User Research: Design Products and Services People Need and Want

3.3 - How to Get Started with Affinity Diagrams

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Personas and User Research: Design Products and Services People Need and Want

4.2 - How Personas Shape Stronger Design Decisions

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    There's quite a lot of psychological evidence  that empathy is geared towards individuals. And I want to talk about two long-standing research studies. One from 1983 by David Sears, called "The Person Positivity Bias", where he presented two sets of participants with exactly the same attributes. One set of participants was told that these attributes applied to a person,

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    an individual, and the other group of participants was told that these attributes applied to multiple people. And the participants who thought they were having the descriptions of individuals thought more highly of those individuals than the other participants did of the groups. So, that is pretty strong evidence for the person  positivity bias, as he called it. The second study is by Nordgren and McDonnell, and they established that the reactions to a fraud were more severe

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    when it was presented with only three victims rather than 30. The two sets of participants were given exactly the same details, but one set was told that it was only three victims, and the other set was told that it was 30, and the three victims thought it was a more heinous crime and actually gave the perpetrators a longer prison sentence when asked.

Personas and User Research: Design Products and Services People Need and Want

4.5 - Why Personas Don’t Represent Every User

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