Workshops that focus on mapping out the experience prove to be significantly more helpful in forming an experience strategy that company leadership agrees with and fully supports than elaborate PowerPoint presentations, or long finding reports that no one reads.

The example that follows are meant to illustrate the value of persona workshops, and how their outcomes serve the design process. The example is by no means definitive, as there are many variations to nearly all the design activities.

Designers have several objectives from a persona workshop. First, they want to actively engage company leadership and relevant stakeholders. The workshops provide an opportunity to connect business and audience research activities outlined in Chapter 3, Business and Audience Context, with the user research process. Personas model audience segments whose attendees are very familiar with, but thinking about their customers from an experience-focused perspective is often new to them.

Next, designers might want to compare how company leaderships self-evaluates experience aspects of its product, to actual customer feedback collected through surveys, focus groups, and contextual inquiry sessions. This is how designers can assess and communicate expectation gaps that might exist between the current version of the product, and what customers expect.

As an example for one of the workshop's activities, the facilitator might ask participants to rate on a scale of 1 to 10 how well, in their opinion, the current version of their web-based product is performing against a set of experience themes such as the following:

• Security and trust: Does the product support the latest security features such as a two-factor authentication for personal identity verification? Can users provide alternative means of payment instead of their credit card information, such as PayPal or Apple Pay?
• Overall look and feel: Does the product look contemporary and professional across all its screens and across all devices?
• Availability and clarity of content: Does the product provide guidance and content that can help users perform various tasks, and is that content easy to understand, or heavy with terminology and jargon?
• Mobile experience: Is the product performing well, and does it look good on mobile devices?

Designers can then ask participants to rate on the same scale, what, in their opinion a customer's expectations are for the product, across the same experience themes. Often, the two sets of ratings--a self-evaluation of the product's current-state, and what customers expect, reveal a gap in the quality of experience, which the new design needs to bridge.

The team can then look at survey results, and compare self-assessment ratings, against actual customer ratings that were collected in the survey. At the end of such workshops, the personas contain qualitative and quantitative product experience information, which has been developed and confirmed with active involvement and participation of company and product leadership. Such direct involvement often leads to securing appropriate commitment, priorities, and budgets to the design project.

If there is one convincing way to advocate for investing in experience design, it is to show business leaders numerical evidence that represent aspects of the experience, such as customer attitudes, needs, pain-points, and goals.

The trend with persona documents is toward creating artifacts that can be updated and used continuously and iteratively throughout the products life cycle, from experience strategy, to post-release improvements.