Abstract
PurposePersonas are lifelike characters that are driven by potential or real users’ personal goals and experiences when interacting with a product. Personas support user-centered design by focusing on real users’ needs. However, the use of personas in educational research and design requires certain adjustments from its original use in human-computer interface design. This paper aims to propose a process of creating personas from phenomenographic studies, which helps us create data-grounded personas effectively.Design/methodology/approachPersonas have features that can help address design problems in educational contexts. The authors compare the use of personas with other common methodologies in education research, including phenomenology and phenomenography. Then, this study presents a six-step process of building personas using phenomenographic study as follows: articulate a design problem, collect user data, assemble phenomenographic categories, build personas, check personas and solve the design problem using personas. The authors illustrate this process with two examples, including the redesign of a professional development website and an undergraduate research program design.FindingsThe authors find that personas are valuable tools for educational design websites and programs. Phenomenography can productively help educational designers and researchers build sets of personas following the process the authors propose.Originality/valueThe use and method of personas in educational contexts are scarce and vague. Using the example contexts, the authors provide educational designers and researchers a clear method of creating personas that are relatable and applicable for their design problems.
Highlights
The field of education research has rapidly brought numerous insights into learning, teaching and professional development
We propose a method of creating personas largely based on the approach commonly used in interface design, but with modifications that involve completing a phenomenographic analysis as part of the process
We suggest that an effective first step in building a set of personas is a phenomenographic study
Summary
The field of education research has rapidly brought numerous insights into learning, teaching and professional development. The focus of this paper is the application of a user-centered design tool called personas from the interface design context to education. Our work aims to illustrate a method to implement personas to approach design problems-based around educational user needs and goals [1]. Instead of focusing on users’ activity, Cooper (1999) proposes a design approach called goaldirected design, which prompts designers to focus on people’s goals and attitudes in the early stage of the design process to devise design solutions that users find useful, powerful and pleasurable. The user-centered design process coupled with the method of personas can help designers to empathize with and understand users’ goals. We discuss personas via two examples of educational problems of practice as follows: supporting faculty professional development (Madsen et al, 2019) and engaging undergraduate students in research (Huynh et al, 2020). While our prior papers have focused on the personas themselves, this paper focuses on the methodology of generating and using personas
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