 I lost my own startup $250,000 US dollars by not doing Proto Personas. I'll share my step-by-step process so you won't make the same mistake. I'm Chris, a designer turned entrepreneur. Today, I'll share why a Proto Persona workshop is the cheapest way to unlock user empathy for your startup or design projects. If you don't have time or budget to do research with real users, you should start by developing Proto Personas that represent the actual audience your product will be interacting with. Stick around until the end where I share how I crashed and burned my last startup because I didn't do Proto Personas early. Yeah. So what is a Proto Persona? A Provisional Persona, or Proto Persona, are the best guests at understanding who is using or will be using our products. A Persona is a fictional character, and in UX, Personas are one of the tools for understanding and empathizing with your target audience. These fictional characters play a different user type for our products, service, each representing real user goals, needs, behaviors, and pain points. And these are based on what we know or think we know about the user, their goals, beliefs, etc. Conducting a Proto Persona workshop can serve a few goals. You can introduce your team to the concept of Personas. You can start thinking from a customer centric point of view. You get your team members to debate and agree upon value propositions that serve the needs and goals of their audience. You can help steer, inform, and justify design decisions. You can help stakeholders feel more empathetic to user needs. This gives UX designers the information they need to understand user intention and create an ideal experience for these users. So how do you go about creating a Proto Persona workshop? Like most things in UX, creating Proto Personas is an iterative process. There are numerous ways to create Proto Personas, but I suggest conducting a workshop with your team so that everybody can agree on the major profiles of these users. So let's get into it. First step is you compile existing data prior to the workshop. Then invite three to five participants that may have knowledge about customers and users of the product or service. Then present the objectives and agenda to set expectations early for your participants. Ask the following questions to get insight related to the demographics and the environment, behaviour and actions, needs and goals. Naturally, you want to define the pain points that your users might have and the devices and tools they use. Of course, it's time to brainstorm, brainstorm and brainstorm. Everyone in the room will have a different take on what they feel are the pain points, goals, motivations. So it's important for everybody to voice these. The next step is to give your Proto Persona a real name so that a team can easily refer to them. And finally, don't forget to summarise the workshop. After the workshop is done, it's time to create your digital Proto Persona. This will help your stakeholders and team digest the information easier. To add empathy for your potential users, give your Proto Persona a face. How they look should reflect the demographic. Everybody's heard of this quote, you are not the user. I mean, how many times do we jump into designing a solution without placing the users at the forefront of the problem? I think too many. How do we know our hypotheses and assumptions are correct before diving into building the product? The answer is we don't. As promised, here's the story. Well, I learned the lesson the hard way. I co-founded a Web3 startup back in 2021. We ran on assumptions. We shipped fast, rounds and rounds of internal iterations and finally showed our customers the fourth version. Seven months later, and it completely flopped. We produced a vitamin and not a painkiller. For whatever reason, we just wanted to build cool things we could use versus being customer centric. I think every product builder suffers from this. The lesson, you are not the user. You are not the user. We raised and burned $250,000. We ceased operation in 2022. There it is. That's the story. Creating a prototype persona is a good approach to summarizing common traits of your target market. Still, it is very unlikely your customers will perform actions or think exactly like the personas that you've built. This is also why I recommend incorporating various different research methods throughout your UX design process to validate your team's assumptions. Now that we've explored the importance of conducting a prototype persona workshop, especially to help center the user in the design process, you can start rethinking how you do your design research. If you're interested in learning more about prototype personas with a detailed guide and templates, check out the link in the description. Or, or, or, or, hit the big red button for another play-by-play breakdown of UX frameworks. Bye!