17: Empathic Design: Building Learner Personas

personas. As instructional designers or learning professionals in any capacity, we sometimes get into the habit and we get a little use to what we do and how we do it that we automatically think that we know what's best for our learners. And that's not always the case. A lot of times, I think it's helpful for us to take a step back and remember exactly who our learners are. And what better way to do that, than to

create learner personas. This is a technique that's used in user experience and user interface design as well. So it's a really important way to make sure that we're meeting the needs of our learners. There are a number of different resources out there on empathy frameworks in design personas, but I'm just going to share a couple with you today. The first one is the empathy framework by Calgary and Visser

created in 2009. In this, they explain a four phase way to consider our learners, including their hopes, their dreams, their situation and their goals. So the first phase of this empathy framework is discovered. This is where you explore the person and their situation and their

experiences. And this is where your curiosity is really piqued about the person, you can kind of think of this as the brainstorming phase, because you're really just exploring right now what the person is thinking where they come from their backstory, I don't know if you're like me, but I'll sit there and people watch somewhere. And I'll create an entire backstory for a person that I've never met before that I just see along the way. And that's step one. Phase two is

immerse. This is where you kind of put yourself in the person's shoes. That's typically where if you're creating a persona, you give the person and name, right. And you really want to just let your mind kind of wander throughout all of these phases to really get a good picture of what your learner looks like. The third phase is connect. This is where you draw from your own experiences and your own memories. And you're able to make a connection with this learner on an emotional level.

So that you can know and start to understand what it is that this learner wants, and what this learner needs in regards to learning objectives in regard to the deliverable that you're producing. And then finally, phase four of this is to detach. This is where you step back, and objectively look at the world that you've created for this learner, and make sure that it's complete, an accurate and a good picture. And then you also reflect on based on this persona you've created, you reflect on

the goals of the learner. And this is how you then align to your learning experience. I'll share the link to that framework in the show notes. But there's another empathy map that I want to share with you from Dave Gray and Connie Malamud where it's simply just kind of a four quadrant setup with a place in the middle for an image or an idea. And then the four quadrants represent what you're mapping out. So first, you decide who you're empathizing

with. And then you create four different areas to brainstorm what that person says, what they think, what they feel, and what they do. And once you filled in those with the different ideas that you have, you have a space to kind of come up with a conclusion. Again, it's about putting yourself in the learners shoes and creating a story about your learner that can help you to best understand their needs. And to create the set of deliverables, or the experience or the objectives that that

learner needs. Again, I'll share the link to that specific post in the show notes. But what does this actually look like in practice? How do you actually turn this into a learner persona? In my experience, I've created personas for a number of different learning projects, because it really helps me when I don't know a lot about the need. Or when I don't have a ton of technical knowledge on the type of learning experience that needs to happen. And so one important thing for me is to

have a photo. And I talk about unsplash.com, all the time on LinkedIn. But I would start with unsplash.com, because there's a number of free photos and a number of different people that you can find in the photos there. And look for your person. It's kind of one of those things where, when you see them, you'll know it, right, now that you've started to brainstorm a little bit, find it, find the person that fits it, and then keep

going. Right? So if you get some basic information down, right, let's say you have the person's name that you've made up, you have a quick backstory for that person, their age, their overall high level career goals. Now you go and you find a picture. And now you can allow that picture to inform you even more, right? What does this person do for fun? What do they worry about? What are obstacles that might get in the way of their learning? What are their professional goals? Five years

down the road? What are they nervous about? What do they like to do for fun? Who is their motivation? Right? Are they trying to get ahead in life? Because they have a family to support? Or are they just kind of letting the wind take them because they've had a really rough time. And they're really just trying to learn and find out more about themselves. So these are all very important questions, and very involved

questions. And what I like to do too, is like, there's not one person that represents your learning experience, right? So I like to come up with at least three, if I'm really trying to build out a learning experience, I need at least three different personas of the type of person who's going to consume the information. So for instance, just to give an example, if I am implementing a new LMS, I might create a persona of my end user.

And the first one would be the person who likes to go in and explore everything in the LMS and likes to do a lot of professional development outside of what they're required to do the go getter, the person that's going to dive in and just use the system to its fullest, right. On the other hand, I would create another persona for the person who is only going into the LMS by force, right? The person who is in there for compliance training once a year, and then doesn't want to sign in

any other time. The third person I would create in that scenario would be the LMS admin, right? The person who's using the back end of the LMS, and what their needs are, and how those needs are going to be a lot different than the person who's only seeing the front end, right. And if you noticed in that example, that I just kind of made up off the top of my head. I didn't go with an instructional design problem, right? I went with implementing an LMS, which might be an instructional designers

responsibility. Or it might be a learning and development manager or an LMS. Administrator. So the point there is that it doesn't really matter which part of learning and development that you're working in. You can use learner personas for many different things. Like I mentioned before, they're using this in UX and UI. They're using this in software development. They're using this in lots of other fields outside of learning

and development. So this is just one example of how we can take it in arfield and make it work for us. I want to close this brief solo episode by bringing up one more resource that I'm going to share in the show notes. A scholarly journal article called building empathy and developing instructional design experience and skills written by John Mackey, who is my PhD advisor. And also the reason I know about empathic

design. And Jennifer Machel. In their case study, they explore how instructional designers utilized six personas to help IDs put themselves in user shoes. This was actually a project that I was part of, in that I was able to use these personas to design for one of my classes at Old Dominion University. So it definitely resonates with me. And it goes into a lot of detail about the idea of empathic design and how you can really use these personas in your own experience.

But I want to just leave you with one quote from that article. I know that we hear a lot in 2021, about storytelling as a means for retention for our learners. And storytelling is becoming one of the new trending topics that I keep hearing about. So here's the quote that I want to share from this article. Personas can often fall flat by failing to engage designers on an emotional level.

When the story around a persona provides narrative tension and an element of surprise, designers find it easier to talk about users remember users and get a shared view of users. So if you've never used this idea of creating a persona to inform your design work, I would highly encourage you to at least give it a try. Because if nothing else, it can actually be really fun to make up backstories for your learner's but I think you'll find that it provides a ton of value to your learning

deliverable. Thanks again for joining me on the blog. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with friends and review us on your favorite podcast platform. I hope you'll tune in again soon.