Learner Persona Discovery
Overview
In design, understanding and focusing on the end user during the entire design process is essential to the success of the final product. This is no different when designing instruction. Who is our audience? This goes beyond demographics, such as gender, age, work experience, and education. We need to gain empathy with our audience for whom we are designing and construct personas. The core concept of empathy is the ability to emotionally identify with another. Written in narrative, personas are fictitious representations of our learners intended to convey their hopes, dreams and fears, and what they want to accomplish. Through personas, we have empathy for our real learners and we use this empathic link to make all our design decisions in light of how it impacts our learners. When we walk in the shoes of our learners, we design with a holistic view of our audience. This is what instructional design is all about.
Empathy Framework
The ability to identify with learners's thoughts and feelings is a key quality of the instructional designer's process. A 4-phase empathy framework (Kouprie & Visser, 2009) shown below will guide us as we consider our learners and their hopes, dreams, fears, circumstances, and what they want to accomplish.
Before you move on ...
Let's take a moment to explore the process of empathy in design by following the 4-phase empathy framework. Follow the prompts below to practice empathy design through persona discovery.
Image Credit: Nicholas, G. (2015). Times Square Expressions (Links to an external site.). CC BY 2.0
Please take a moment and closely examine the photo above. Reflect on the prompts below as they relate to the empathy framework described above.
1. Discover: Raise your curiosity. Enter the world of these people. Explore and discover the people, their situation, and experiences. Take 1-2 minutes to do this.
2. Immerse: Wander around in their world. Expand your knowledge about the people. Give them names. It is okay to be surprised by various aspects that influence their experience and circumstances. What may be their hopes, fears, and dreams? Be open-minded. Don’t judge. Get interested in their point of reference. Take 2 minutes to do this.
3. Connect: Resonate with these people. Recall upon your own memories and experiences in order to reflect and be able to create an understanding. Make a connection on an emotional level with the people by recalling your own feelings and resonating with their experience. Take 2 minutes to do this.
4. Detach: Step back and make sense of their world. Reflect on new insights for ideas to help them. What may they want to accomplish? Take 1-2 minutes to do this.
Persona Discovery: Your Learners
A host of hopes, dreams, fears, and what they want to accomplish differentiate our potential target audience of learners. To help us discover our personas, a panel of subject matter experts (SMEs) in adult education worked with us to develop six personas that represent our target audience. Again, these personas do not describe actual people. Instead, each persona is discovered to accurately represent the learners who will take a high school equivalency exam and who may benefit from the instruction you will be developing. Please take time to read and reflect on each of the six learner personas linked within the exhibit below. As we will refer to these personas frequently throughout the course, you may find it helpful to print them for your reference.
Learner Personas |
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