Personas: How can they help and what information do I need to build them?

Introduction

Diverse audiences create unique challenges for curriculum developers. "In any rhetorical situation," there is always a controlling need, "which functions as the organizing principle: it specifies the audience to be addressed and the change to be effected (1). If curriculum designers don't account for their audience when developing content, they limit their ability to achieve effective rhetorical discourse. "Audience is one of the most important elements of rhetorical studies because so many strategies used in persuasive situations are based on appeals to an audience" (2). Ultimately, developing an understanding of one's audience requires empathy. Personas can help curriculum designers develop empathy for their audience.

The Need for Personas

A critical issue facing education is recognition that educators must humanize the learning experiences of students from subordinated populations to forge a "cultural democracy" where all students are treated with respect and dignity (3). Personas can help curriculum designers understand the challenges faced by students with diverse cultural backgrounds. "Personas make it easy to imagine the real people who will eventually use the product you are designing and building" (4) because they allow curriculum designers to develop a personalized view of marginalized groups, and this allows the authors to better incorporate empathy for those groups into their designs. "Personas can act as a successful tool to remind the design team of more diverse student profiles" (5), so that they can account for the challenges created due to "differences in communication styles and strategies across national and cultural boundaries [and the need to] demonstrate sensitivity to those cultures" (6). Personas can connect the frameworks of identity with the viewpoints of diverse individuals, but their creation requires specific data. The data required to build a viable persona mirrors the dimensions of diversity depicted in Figure 1 (below).

Figure 1. The above image from the U.S. Navy's Enlisted Leadership Development course shows some of the diverse elements that make up an individual. Curriculum designers should consider these factors when they design their curriculum if their goal is to create inclusive classrooms.

What Goes into a Persona and Why?

To develop realistic personas that capture diverse student profiles, designers need to understand the frameworks of identity. "Generally, the process of creating personas begins with qualitative research—one-on-one interviews or focus groups—conducted among the target audience. Interview or focus group notes are reviewed in order to find patterns that enable the designer to group similar people together into types of users based on their attitudes, behavior, or goals. Each category is then reduced to an 'individual' with a name, a photo, demographic information, and key characteristics. To ensure that the personas created are representative of the target audience as a whole, quantitative data collected from surveys or other large-scale studies of the target audience, can be used to validate the personas" (7). Simply put, to build accurate personas, you need to collect information from real people. Personas are "archetypical users whose goals and characteristics represent the needs of a larger group of users and allow designers a user's perspective, very similar to an educational needs analysis, but more personal" that can be used to promote inclusive education (8). The information used to build a persona includes key factors that shape the identity of the groups that the persona represents, including group memberships, cultural identities, and common individual values. "Personas represent the needs of users in diverse populations and impact design by endearing empathy and improving communication" (9). The main benefit of these representations lies in "promoting inclusivity in education by identifying non-traditional students as well as how characteristics of different student groups interact with one another" (10). Personas can tell us about "people's goals, interests, and behaviors" by creating a "holistic image of a person" (11). Figure 2 (below) is an example of a persona used by Wikipedia. Some of the information in this persona might also describe a college student in the United States.

Figure 2. A persona used by Wikipedia obtained from the Wikimedia Commons. A persona might be as simple as the one above, or include complex graphs designed to reflect the cultural and literacy frameworks that make up the individual identity of the persona.

Incorporating the various elements of identity, both individual and social, into a persona can help curriculum developers identify diverse viewpoints that they might not otherwise consider. Designing courses using personas as a "fictional representation of a user group . . . intended to foster empathy for that particular user group whose needs resemble the fictional persona (12), is an important part of developing classrooms that are truly inclusive.

Personas offer many benefits, but they also create specific challenges that curriculum developers must understand.

Citations

1. Bitzer, 1999, p. 221.

2. Smith, 2009, p. 2.

3. Bartolome, 1994, p. 11.

4. Pruitt and Adlin, 2006, p. 19.

5. Ozkan et al., 2019, p. 3.

6. Thrush, 1997, p. 416.

7. Van Rooij, 2012, p. 79.

8. Stripe et al., 2021, p. 1635.

9. Salminen et al., 2022, p. 1.

10. Salminen et al., 2022, p. 5.

12. Marsden et al., 2019, p. 2.

Follow the References link at the top of the page for a full list of references.