Agile Learner Personas for Instructional Design

Meet Trixie. She’s 25 years old and started her firstprofessional job about a year ago. She uses a smartphone for texting andtweeting, but also for shopping, banking, and dating (by the way, she’ssingle). Trixie holds a bachelor’s degree in economics from a liberal artscollege and she’ll probably go back to get her master’s, maybe an MBA, butright now she’s focusing on her position as a market analyst (her mentor speakshighly of her work ethic but mentioned that her understanding of marketing isfairly rudimentary at this point) and on the non-profit she and a collegefriend started to provide creative spaces to under-resourced communities.

Oh, one more thing: Trixie’s not a real person.

What’s a “persona”?

Or rather, Trixie is many, many people. She’s a combinationof their educational backgrounds, position in the organization, and worldviews.Trixie is the primary learner persona for a series of marketing modules for amanufacturer with a global presence. They made the decision to start theirmarketing training in North America and will expand and adapt the training formarketers worldwide later. At that time, Trixie will fade into the backgroundand Jens will get all the attention.

Jens isn’t real either, but the instructional designer onthe project could describe him so well you would be convinced Jens and the IDwere friends. That’s because the ID and the project sponsors spent almost halfa day discussing typical learners for the upcoming marketing modules. Theyassigned ages, genders, career goals, technology comfort-levels, educationalbackgrounds, and attitudes toward eLearning. They even attributed outside interestsand family and social relationships. So now the ID knows Trixie and Jens (andBill and Sonal) well enough to suggest their favorite restaurants and order forthem.

Why create personas?

And that’s the value of learner personas—they are people. Themantra of all IDs is “design for the learner,” not “design for the demographicstatistics.” Putting a name and face (well, almost) to the stats makes it mucheasier to understand what the learners will really need. At every decisionpoint, the instructional designer can ask herself, “What does Trixie need?” or“What does Trixie want?” and the answer will probably be pretty obvious.

Developing learner personas can be time-consuming buteveryone involved usually enjoys the process. There will likely be some debateand questioning but most project sponsors get a kick out of inventing people.It’s helpful to start the process with some explanations and caveats.

Three important details

One, clear up the issue of stereotypes and generalizations.Some feel uncomfortable with the process because it can feel like stereotyping,that is assuming all members of a group will have the same traits. Commentslike “Not all millennials show up to work late” or “I know many retail clerkswho are ambitious” indicate that some in the group might misunderstand theprocess. Acknowledge that this process relies on generalizations. In fact, thisprocess does not work withoutgeneralizations. And explain that generalizations are inferences based on carefulobservation and personal experiences. Wherestereotypes are a list of traits assigned to all members of a group,generalizations are descriptions of a group based on its members.

At this point, some may argue that generalizations canquickly turn into stereotypes (which they can) and that oversimplifiedgeneralizations won’t lead to learner personas that are useful forinstructional design. But these aren’t oversimplified generalizations, whichleads to . . .

Two, you can have more than one learner persona. You should have more than one persona. So,when someone says that a particular description doesn’t apply to everyone, youcan say “Great! We’ll make a learner persona for the others next.” We allrecognize that just because people might have the same job description doesn’tmean they all fit the same learner persona. You might end up creating two,three, or four personas. As you develop thepersonas, determine how many learners each one represents. If a personatypifies less than 10 percent of the learners, it’s probably not necessary todevote time fleshing that persona out, because …

Three, in the end, the group will have to come to aconsensus about who the primary learner is. Choosing isn’t based strictly on numbers,but it’s unlikely that a small percentage of outliers will become the primarylearner. For example, Trixie represents about 80 percent of the company’s NorthAmerican learners. The remaining 20 percent are typically a little older, havebeen with the company longer than Trixie, and are shifting from non-marketingto marketing roles. The project sponsors decided to choose Trixie as theirprimary learner persona partly because she represented such a large number. Butthey also decided that in meetingTrixie’s needs for marketing fundamentals, the courses would also meet the mostimportant needs of the other 20 percent. And some of the other content thatTrixie needs—developing customer relationships, cross-functional communications—mightbe a little redundant for more experienced learners but won’t detract fromtheir learning experiences. Who knows? It might even be a valuable refresher.

In other instances, the numbers have very little to do withchoosing the primary persona. This was the case with Jens. He represents onlyabout a third of the company’s European workers, but they selected him anyway.Jens exemplifies the population that the organization inherited when itacquired several smaller companies about a decade ago. Jens is loyal to hisproducts and has a valuable customer network but he’s somewhat resistant to themarketing ideas the company has adopted in the last couple years. Jens isserving as the primary learner for the next phase of training development becausehe’s likely to be a difficult learner to reach. If the training is designed toappeal to even the most reluctant learners, the courses will almost certainly appealto enthusiastic learners, so the ID can focus on Jens knowing that the otherlearners will be just fine.

All the stakeholders benefit from personas

Learner personas aren’t just valuable for instructionaldesigners, though. They’re useful touchstones for all stakeholders, even (ormaybe especially) the project sponsors. If a project’s scope begins to creep,you can bring it back by asking whether the additions will help Trixie. Or,midway through the project, you might be struck by an inspiration and you canpropose changes based on Trixie’s needs. Best of all, millions of learners benefitfrom the well-designed training that learner personas make possible.

Want more?

At DevLearn2015 Conference & Expo, Allison Anderson will present Personas and theLearning Ecosystem (Session 811, Friday, October 2, at 10:00 AM). This sessionexamines the importance of evaluating business goals, the technicalenvironment, and the learner experience. You will learn how to use real-worldexamples of building data-based learner personas and how personas can be usedto build a better vision, create a better road map, and make better decisionsfor both business impact and the learner experience. Key points:

• Why it’s important to understand the learner’sexperience
• What a good persona looks like
• How we build personas
• How we use personas to make decisions