Build Empathy and Understanding into Human-Centered Design with Personas
by Breana Yaklin
Creating personas for user experience or market research can be an extremely useful tool to model an experience. Personas are a representation of a person or group of people, based on research, with the purpose of helping others understand the behavior, experiences, and choices of that person or group of people. In market research, personas help marketers understand the target market and how customers might engage with the project or service. At the MSU Hub for Innovation in Learning and Technology, we’ve used personas in many different ways, such as testing out new tools or building empathy with our students.
As defined by Shlomo Goltz, personas, which are frequently used in market research and web development, are a “way to communicate and summarize research trends and patterns to others” and to “create different designs for different kinds of people.”
In education, personas can serve as a valuable resource for incorporating student voice into learning design work and student-focused decision making. As learning experience designers, human-centered design principles are essential to our design processes. Student personas provide a way for us to build empathy with our students during the design process when we can’t bring students into the process. Creating student personas from interviews with students also creates an opportunity to conduct more qualitative research when we already have a lot of quantitative data about our students. Creating personas can help us understand the “why” behind the “what.”
To create personas, it’s important to think carefully about the questions you want to ask and use to drive the conversation. What data points are you looking to gather about the population? The questions you ask will eventually serve to inform the structure of the personas you create, so it is important to think about your end goal and what you hope to achieve by creating personas. Our primary goal when creating a set of student personas was to better understand the undergraduate student experience. We wanted to know more about what motivates students and what are the frustrations or barriers they experience. Here are some starter questions you might consider for similar work:
General Introduction: Tell us a little about yourself (area of study, school attended, degree/program, extracurriculars, etc.)
Motivation: How did you decide to attend that school? How did you decide on your major/program?
Value: What courses and learning experiences have been most meaningful and engaging to you?
Pain Points: Can you share any barriers or frustrations that have hindered you from being successful?
Closing Thoughts: Best/worst parts of your learning experience.
The next step of our process was to interview students individually or in small focus groups to gather their responses. We recorded these conversations, transcribed them, and used Dedoose to identify patterns and themes in the conversations. As Emerson, R., Fretz, R., and Shaw, L. (2011) discuss in Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes, developing “analytic themes” is key to synthesizing and coding qualitative data (p. 178). These themes became our coding tree in Dedoose. For example, we highlighted places in the conversation where students talked about their motivations or frustrations, and then further classified the conversation with more details. Under “frustrations” we might see things like “finances” or “homesickness.” We used this coding tree to inform a set of personas that was rooted in the topics that came up in conversation.
Finally, we created a framework for each persona and took the most common topics or talking points and sorted them into the framework. Here’s an example of the framework we used for our student personas:
There are many examples of similar frameworks or personas you can find through simple research that will help you to get started.
As a point of caution, be aware of the limitations in your research as you create your personas. In the case of our student personas, we sought out interviews based on student interest and availability. This means we were convenience-sampling and didn’t have a true representation of all undergraduate students at Michigan State University (Lavrakas, 2008). We saw a limited number of students from a limited number of colleges within the university. As such, we included a statement at the beginning of our personas outlining the limitations of our work, and the number of student participants we saw from each college and undergraduate year. It is important to be aware of how you are or are not representing diverse experiences, to be transparent about who you are actually representing, and to take care with how the personas are used based on this information. Along with a statement on our limitations, we included a statement that the student personas be used cautiously as a means to build empathy and understanding. Since we did not have a true representation of all undergraduate students and their diverse experiences, it was important that our set of student personas not be used to make decisions about allocating resources or funding. The student personas help to provide a richer understanding of the undergraduate experience and the journey that students undergo, and can help to inform the design process, but should not be used solely to inform major decisions.
Here’s an example of one of the personas we created based on our interview process and this framework:
Emerson, R., Fretz, R., Shaw, L. (2011). Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes, 2nd ed. The University of Chicago Press. Chicago.
Goltz, S. (2014). A Closer Look At Personas: What They Are and How They Work. Smashing Magazine. Retrieved October 25, 2016, from https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2014/08/a-closer-look-at-personas-part-1/
Lavrakas, P. J. (2008). Encyclopedia of survey research methods (Vols. 1–0). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, Inc. doi: 10.4135/9781412963947
