What are the challenges associated with personas, and how do I overcome those challenges?

Stereotypes Figure 1. Male stereotypes.

Personas represent a means of generating empathy and designing better content for diverse audiences, but that very diversity creates challenges in creating useful personas. People are complicated, and understanding their many "needs, desires, preferences, and behaviors" is not a simple task (1). One concern with personas is that generalizing data about large groups of similar people can promulgate stereotypes. Personas are generalizations describing people, and so are stereotypes. In fact, you can use stereotypes in your personas, if they are used "with care," especially when using "common knowledge" or "cultural lore" (2). Stereotypes incorporated into personas should be based on data collected as part of a process to develop the personas. For example, if a survey reveals that all respondents of a certain socioeconomic status share a stereotypical view, it would be logical to incorporate that view into the persona designed to represent the respondents. However, without such data, a stereotype should not be applied to a persona. "A stereotype quickly identifies a persona that differs from development team members, which is good. It may give rise to empathy. But once in place, a stereotype could lead team members to ignore inconsistent evidence" that differs from the expected stereotype (3). Used without care, stereotypes have the potential to amplify the disconnect between content creators and their audience. How to—and whether—to use stereotypes presents one challenge in implementing personas. Another challenge centers on ensuring curriculum designers develop empathy for the groups represented by the personas.

Empathy

The whole point of incorporating personas into curriculum design is that they hold promise as a means of developing empathy. For personas to create empathy, curriculum designers must identify with the personas, and by extension, the group of individuals that the persona represents. College professors have attempted to implement personas into their design process, and those personas did not develop empathy in the way that they hoped.

At one "large Mid-Atlantic research-intensive institution," personas were created to "explore the potential breadth of the curriculum and expand the faculty perspective on who could be a successful ECE [Electrical and Computer Engineering] student." The curriculum designers built five personas and attempted to apply them to the curriculum design process. The educators discovered that one persona was "by far the most commonly referenced persona, partly due to the prevalence of this student in the department, but also due to the resemblance of the persona to the faculty." The educators described the need for faculty advocates, stating that "the personas that are less frequently referenced in curriculum design conversations are the ones that do not have faculty . . . at large advocating for them" and noted that each persona might benefit from an assigned "faculty champion." (4).

The ECE study demonstrated that the same biases and preferences that can cause members of dominant groups to marginalize minority groups apply to the personas representing those minority groups. The study identified faculty support as a key factor, and designers attempting to use personas to foster empathy would do well to designate a representative to advocate for each persona during the course design process. A faculty advocate can represent the persona, and by extension, the group that persona represents; this can increase the odds of successfully developing empathy. Figure 2 (below) is a depiction of "The Double Empathy Problem" and illustrates that challenges that autistic and non-autistic individuals face in trying to understand one another. The illustration is useful because one can substitute the names of different social and cultural groups for the words "autistic" and "non-autistic," and the same barriers to empathy will often exist. Additionally, curriculum designers would do well to include a persona representing autistic students, given that a study by Shattuck et al., posted to the National Library of Medicine, reports that 34.7 of youth with autism spectrum disorder attend college after high school.

Figure 2. The Double Empathy Problem, obtained from Wikimedia Commons, notes the challenges of applying empathy across different frameworks.

Implementing personas is not without challenges, but if successfully implemented, personas can help foster positive outcomes for diverse groups of students by incorporating empathy into the process of curriculum design.

What if we overcome the challenges?

Implementing personas into curriculum design can create positive outcomes for diverse students. "Though generally associated with education for the design professions, personas as a technique for creating empathy can be applied to education for other professions. In teacher education, for example, using personas enables aspiring teachers to better understand the challenges of the 21st Century classroom" (5). "Among the various stakeholder groups, the impact that personas have had ranged from revealing implicit beliefs about who belongs . . . to representing the end goal of departmental culture change" (6). Personas have the potential to increase inclusivity by representing traditionally marginalized groups. "Persona use brings sociopolitical issues to the surface. Each persona has a gender, age, race, ethnicity, family or cohabitation arrangement, socioeconomic background, and work and/or home environment (even if you don't include all of these directly in the persona description, the photos you use will imply decisions on these details). This provides an effective avenue for recognizing and perhaps changing your team's assumptions about users" (7). Developing inclusive content that accounts for students' social and cultural identities and the various literacies associated with those identities is an important part of crafting a learning environment that will support diverse students. Personas can aid in creating such content by enhancing the empathy of curriculum developers for their audiences.

Citations

1. Pruitt and Aldin, 2006, p. 6.

2. Pruitt and Aldin, 2006, p. 242.

3. Grudin, 2006, p. 650.

4. Ozkan et al., 2019, p. 1–6.

5. Van Rooij, 2012, p. 83.

6. Ozkan et al., 2019, p. 7.

7. Pruitt and Adlin, 2006, p. 242.

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