Personas Place Developer Focus on Learners’ Needs

If someone offered you a tool that could increase learnerengagement and make your eLearning more relevant, would you use it?

Consider using learner personas. According to LaceyJennings, a service delivery leader at Xerox Learning Services,using personas “gives anyone who’s working on [the eLearning] deeper insightinto what is motivating the learners.”

Using personas enables developers to present a compellingmessage to learners, said Sarah Thompson, marketing and communications efficacyimprovement manager at Pearson. That message is: “We’re not telling you whatyou need to learn; you’re finding what you need to learn—and it’s relevant toyou.”

A persona is an archetype: a composite learner who encapsulatesthe traits, preferences, level of experience, and interests that arerepresentative of a slice of the actual learner population. The persona puts aface, albeit fictitious, on what would otherwise be an abstraction, givingeLearning designers and developers a more human target. Considering thepersona’s needs helps a development team hone the eLearning—anything from the overarchinglearning goals to the finer points of how learners will navigate through amodule.

A persona is “such a unique way to look at the learner,”Thompson said. “Instead of saying, ‘You need this information,’ we’re saying, ‘Whatdo you do? What’s involved in your role? What are your challenges in yourrole?’ And then we say, ‘OK, here’s the learning that helps you decrease thechallenges or that risk.’”

Using personas can align designers, developers, and otherstakeholders around clearer goals by creating a shared understanding of whowill use the eLearning, Jennings said. While it does not change the steps inthe development process, “what it does give you is a lot more insight into thebehaviors of your learners so that, hopefully, what you’re designing can bemore impactful,” she said.

It can also streamline an iterative development process andsimplify maintenance. “Doing it better the first time will reduce the number ofiterations and likely ensure that developers have fewer changes in themaintenance cycle,” Thompson said.

Instructional designers conduct extensive audience analysiswhen creating personas, said Megan Torrance, CEO of TorranceLearning. “Personas help inpersonalizing that research into a few key archetypes and give instructionaldesigners a shortcut for referring to a set of needs,” Torrance said. “Forexample, ‘Catherine, as an experienced team member, needs quick referencematerial for incorporating a new process into her routine work, while Nayan isa newer employee for whom we’ll need to connect all the dots from this newprocess to the other work tasks he’s learning about. He needs big-picturestructure and lots of practice.’ By building out the human characteristics ofeach persona, we as instructional designers can stay connected to the learnerswe’re supporting throughout the project.

When creating personas, the project team tries to identifybehavior patterns common among targeted learners so that they can design anddevelop the eLearning in a way that will work for those learners. It can (andshould) capture things like the typical learner’s workflow and how—and where—learnersspend their time. Does the learner need mobile-friendly eLearning? Quicklysearchable stores of information? Can the learner focus on three-minute videos?What about 10-minute videos? How comfortable is the learner with tablets orsmartphone apps?

The emphasis is not on individuals’ personal characteristics,though using personas moves the team to a deeper understanding of the learnersthemselves. “It’s a composite of a group of individuals,” Jennings said; itgives developers information on learners’ personal and professional goals, whatmotivates them, and what their “pain points” or needs are.

Jennings and Thompson describe use of personas as“next-generation needs analysis”—expanding the developers’ focus. One level ofneeds analysis looks at what an organization needs learners to get out oftraining; but personas can home in on the motivations and needs of specificgroups that have different levels of background knowledge and differentprofessional goals.  

Torrance said her agile project teams focus on a singlepersona as the primary one for a project; this might be the persona thatrepresents the largest share of learners, or it might be the persona thatrepresents a priority particular to the situation.

But Thompson said it would be very unusual for her teams touse a single persona. “We really want to look at multiple personas; we neverwant to restrict it to a single one,” she said. “We’re doing our due diligenceby crafting or sculpting multiple personas.”

Thompson provided the example of eLearning that trainslearners on a new product. Some of the learners might be account executives andsales personnel, she said. “Their goals might be related to growing a productline or expansion or just additional sales or new markets. Their motivationmight be a quarterly quota; they might be responsible for a particular product,and their motivation is around enhancing that product or enhancing the use ofthat product,” Thompson said. “And their pain points are crafting the right valueproposition to share with the right customers, pitching [the product] the rightway, or getting that ‘elevator pitch’ down.”

On the other hand: “A product manager has a totallydifferent set of motivations,” she said. “Theirs is improving the product andimproving the usage; and maybe they want to up the numbers—their goals may berelated to adoption. That’s totally different from the sales folks. They don’tneed to craft the pitch or have an elevator speech ready. They are reallylooking at ‘How do we fine-tune the product? How do we make sure the customersare using the product?’”

The core content of the eLearning—information about theproduct features—is relevant to all the learners, Thompson said. “Then there’slittle nuggets that have to be layered on top that address the personas.” Forthe sales-focused persona, those “layers” will be different than for theproduct-manager persona. 

Essentially, a persona is a hook that draws in differentlearners, Thompson said. For sales-focused learners, the message is, “We wantto support you in sharing how those product features are pitched to yourcustomers,” Thompson said. “It’s not ‘We think you need to know this,’ but ‘Wecan solve your problem by providing this solution.’”

“If we say, ‘Our learning helps you with your pain points,’then we are answering their problem. If we twist it that way, it’s a totallydifferent view than saying, ‘We think you need to learn about these productfeatures,’” she said. “It’s a very different suite of hooks; it basically ensuresthat your learning becomes far more useful because you’re really targetingexactly what those personas need.”

Different use cases determine the number and needs of thepersonas. “Personas are a deeper dive into the segmentation within a use case,and personas can be applied to different use cases,” Jennings said.

Thompson added, “Optimally, use cases should reflectprocess, whereas personas should reveal more about the role you are serving. Sopersonas should inform the use cases and help you address the user needs evenbetter.”

Use cases that Jennings encounters frequently includeleadership development, onboarding, and recruiting. For leadership development,her team might create personas for an incumbent manager, a manager who is newto the role, and a new hire into a management position, Jennings said. Each ofthese personas would represent a critical segment of the learner population,and each would have different needs, background, and basic knowledge. Thepersonas would enable designers and developers to target the eLearning to eachgroup’s needs.

Learn more!

To learn more about what personas mean for developers anddesigners, and how to use them, attend the session that Jennings and Thompsonare presenting at DevLearn 2016, Designing Learner Personas: The New Needs Analysis, on November 18.

Torrance is also presenting at DevLearn: Agile Project Management for eLearning on November 16 and Making Future-focused Platform Decisions with the xAPI on November 17.