Workshop: Incorporating Personality Profiles into Personas
Background: As part of FedEx Ground's revitalization, business teams have requested that designers create a library of personas as part of their design work and research to better understand true range of people who use FedEx internal products. As a result, I worked with the design team to research what we would like to achieve from our personas, and part of this included a workshop on the use of personality profiles.
Course Description: Most every designer has heard about personas. But what are they? Why are they important? Most of all, how can we create personas that don’t just sit on someone’s wall but actually make a difference in our designs? This workshop focused on the use of personality profiles to make personas come alive so they more accurately reflect the people we’re designing for. First, the workshop discussed different methods used for gauging and measuring personality, such as Bartles Taxonomy, Myers-Briggs, Jungian archetypes, and People-Service-Profits (PSP), FedEx's own personality classification framework. From there, we discussed the impact of personality on design and how to translate PSP behavioral styles into persona motivations and needs.
Course Format: The workshop was conducted in-person as a design team exercise. Team members participated in a personality profiling exercise using FedEx’s PSP personality framework, and then defined how those personality behavioral styles would be translated into our persona project.
Course Objectives: After completing this course, learners will be able to...
- Identify and compare the different methods used for gauging and measuring personality.
- Understand FedEx's PSP personality classification system and framework.
- Identify their own PSP personality profile and compare with their team members.
- Translate PSP behavioral styles into persona motivations and needs.
- Identify interview questions based on personality traits.
