Hello, I'm Nikki Rhoda founder the design consultancy Denise design, and I'll be your instructor for this course. Throughout my career, I've designed software solutions for Fortune 500. Companies, startups, government organizations and nonprofits. These varied experiences have taught me quite a lot about doing field work under seemingly impossible constraints, and how to deliver a solution that supports my users needs. Fundamentally, I believe that the information design process of research, design, build and repeat or iterate can be applied to the design of anything, from software to presentations, to newsletters, to services to spaces, truly anything where humans are required to make sense of information. I believe that if you understand your products value to your target audience, which a well grounded design process can provide, you're well on your way Adding real value as a designer to anyone you work for.

I've shared these technical skills and more in countless presentations, and I'm sharing them with you. When I'm not teaching, I'm traveling the world and working on redesigning with the concept of work means to me, I invite you to follow my profile, which includes links to my professional background and what I'm up to these days. In this course, we'll be discussing personas, a UX artifact and common piece of product documentation. In general, personas are an overview of your target user group, as a composite person that can be your team's focus on essentials of what they're building and why they're building it. What you'll be learning in this course is important because personas tend to get a pretty bad rap. And I think that's mostly because they're a poorly understood tool and in my opinion, aren't always used correctly.

They may feel like just another piece of required documentation and get through. But these are living documents meaning they should be up to As your understanding of the target audience, or the problems faced changes, keeping you and your team from making disastrous assumptions, thinking of personas as the perfect tool to help you as a user experience professional, keep your team aligned towards the users goal and engage with the problem they're trying to sell for. Personas can therefore be your best friend, if you let them. In this course, we'll be discussing the who, what, where, when, and whys of personas, who do personas represent what goes into a good persona? Where do you get good information from? When in the design process?

Do you use personas? Why should you keep them updated? By the end of this course you should feel confident about effectively using your organization's existing personas, as well as building new ones from scratch. For your class project, you'll be creating at least two personas for health and wellness afterwards. Design part of a larger design process you can use to create a showpiece for your UX portfolio. I'll be weaving this specific design challenge into all the course projects for all of my classes, so you can continue to work with the same project as we move through the whole design process, from user research to requirements gathering through to sketching and prototyping.

In the end, each well crafted design artifacts should be able to stand on its own, but collectively, they'll be able to help you showcase a range of UX skills. As you participate in the course, please feel free to share your project progress in the Project Gallery. I'd love to see how you're all tackling the class project. And I'm happy to work with you as you move through the course material. Please also feel free to share your questions in the forum. I'm happy to answer as best I can.

And you'll be doing everyone else a huge favor by helping and sharing. We're all on the same page about the course content. And we'll get looking forward to working with all of you and I hope you enjoy this course. Remember, everything can be designed