Courses
User Research & Persona Design for SMEs
This 3-hour, human-first, AI-enabled workshop helps startups, SMEs and larger organisations move from assumptions to evidence when designing new products and services. Drawing on best practices from Stanford’s school and MIT, together with design thinking methods developed at Atlantic Technological University (ATU) and refined through a decade of regional industry engagement, you will be guided through a clear, step-by-step qualitative research and analysis process.
Know Your Customer: Build Better Products & Services
A practical, AI-supported workshop to understand your customers, uncover real needs and develop better business ideas.
Are you developing a new product or service, improving an existing offering, or exploring a new business opportunity?
One of the biggest challenges for any business is knowing what customers actually need, rather than what we think they need. Getting this wrong can mean investing valuable time, money and resources in ideas that don’t solve the right problems.
This practical, interactive 3-hour online workshop will introduce you to simple, effective ways to better understand your customers, identify their real challenges and use those insights to shape products and services they genuinely value.
You’ll learn how to ask the right questions, uncover customer needs, recognise patterns in feedback and build realistic customer profiles (known as personas) to guide your business and innovation decisions.
We’ll also explore how AI can help you organise and analyse customer feedback, saving time while keeping real customer experiences at the centre of your decisions.
Based on proven design thinking and customer research approaches, the workshop draws on expertise from Atlantic Technological University (ATU), Stanford and MIT, combining established methods with practical experience supporting businesses and innovation.
What will you learn?
Through practical exercises and small-group activities, you’ll learn how to:
- Challenge assumptions: Define the customer problem or business opportunity you want to explore.
- Ask better questions: Learn simple interviewing techniques to uncover what customers really think, need and experience.
- Make sense of customer feedback: Identify recurring challenges, frustrations and unmet needs.
- Use AI to save time: Explore how AI can support the organisation and analysis of customer insights.
- Build useful customer profiles: Create evidence-based customer personas to help guide product, service and business decisions.
How the workshop works
This is a hands-on workshop, not a lecture. You’ll work with other participants to explore a real business challenge or innovation opportunity and practise techniques you can apply within your own organisation.
Part 1 – Are You Solving the Right Problem?
Identify a customer challenge or opportunity, question your assumptions and get clearer about the problem you’re trying to solve.
Part 2 – Discover What Customers Really Need
Learn how to ask better questions, gather meaningful feedback and identify the customer needs that matter most.
Part 3 – Turn Customer Insights into Better Decisions
Use customer feedback to develop realistic customer profiles and explore how these insights can inform better products, services and innovation decisions.
What will you take away?
By the end of the workshop, you’ll have:
- A clearer understanding of how to identify and validate customer needs.
- Practical tools and templates for gathering and analysing customer feedback.
- Experience creating a customer persona based on research insights.
- An understanding of how AI can make parts of this process quicker and easier.
- A straightforward approach you can reuse when developing or improving products and services.
No previous experience of customer research, design thinking or AI is required.
Workshop details
Format: Online, interactive workshop via Microsoft Teams, with collaborative exercises using Miro.
Duration: 3 hours
Who should attend?
SME owners, managers, entrepreneurs, product and service developers, innovation teams and anyone looking to develop new ideas, improve existing offerings or better understand their customers.
This event is funded through Innovate+. Innovate+ is a fully funded programme supporting small and medium-sized businesses across Northern Ireland and the border counties to adopt innovation, improve sustainability and strengthen their competitiveness.
Delivered through a cross-border partnership, the programme is funded through the PEACEPLUS Programme and managed by the Special EU Programmes Body (SEUPB), with support from the European Union, the UK Government, the Northern Ireland Executive and the Irish Government
