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Persona Lab — but with a very thoughtful AI layer.

The core belief is human-centered: personas aren’t fictional characters, they’re decision-making tools. What we’re adding is AI as a supporting teammate, not the driver.

The session is about 90 minutes, small group, and the goal is for participants to leave with one or two solid personas they actually trust and can reuse in real product work.

Where AI comes in is in three specific, responsible ways.

First, we use AI — via Claude or Perplexity to quickly ground the problem space. Instead of guessing, we let AI summarize real patterns, challenges, or behaviors around the product space we’re designing for. This helps everyone start from a shared reality, especially junior designers who haven’t done much research before.

Second, during persona creation, AI acts as a challenger. After groups build personas themselves, they ask AI to point out assumptions, gaps, or bias. It’s about using AI to stress-test their thinking and make personas more realistic and behavior-driven.

And third, AI helps translate personas into actual design decisions. Participants see how a persona directly influences things like onboarding flow, tone of voice, feature prioritization, and complexity. This is a big gap for many designers. They make personas but don’t know how to apply them. AI helps bridge that.

What I really like about this format is that it teaches people how to work with AI as designers, not how to design with AI blindly. They learn where it helps, where it doesn’t, and why judgment still matters.

So the value is twofold: people walk away with tangible portfolio artifacts, real personas and they also gain a practical framework for using AI responsibly in UX work, which is something everyone’s struggling to articulate right now.

It stays grounded, collaborative, and very real-world and it scales well as we grow the series.

Takeaways:
• Learn how to build behavior-driven personas that go beyond surface-level demographics
• Use AI tools to validate assumptions, detect bias, and strengthen persona realism
• Understand how personas influence real design decisions such as onboarding, tone, navigation, and feature prioritization.
• Gain hands-on experience using AI as a research assistant and design challenger — not a decision-maker
• Leave with 1–2 complete personas suitable for portfolio use or future product work

Tools Used
• Claude
• Perplexity
• Figma (collaborative boards & templates)