An important KISS lesson for user experience design is if you don’t know for whom you are designing, you can’t improve the product. The way UX designers attempt to know the end users is by creating personas. According to Stull, even if the persona is a complete fiction, it also needs to be grounded in the facts as we understand them. These “human-shaped container(s) of data” aid user experience designers to craft a frame through which to see their design and, hopefully, ways to improve it. While considerable emphasis is placed on drafting aspirational personas which are those hoped-for potential new users, in certain situations historical personas may be more relevant.
Drafted from information about prior users, historical personas may have an important place in the educational user experience arena whether it is a traditional education setting or the expanding corporate, self-improvement, upskilling options such as Coursera, Udemy, or edX. In the traditional educational setting, the demographics of the incoming student population aren’t going to change dramatically from year to year. Therefore, understanding who your students were and how they responded to the learning content can provide tremendous insight into how future classes will respond. In addition, education already leans into an iterative design model. For the corporate evolution of skill acquisition, as it is a new (and booming) area of adult education, understanding not only the user adaptation pattern but also how learners who may have not partaken in traditional learning in many years respond to not only a new learning environment but systematic education itself can help improve the educational product as well as user experience.
What also ties both traditional and upskilling learners together is the desire to achieve a goal. The number and variety of tones of said goals are too numerous to mention here; however, they drive student engagement with the content. According to Cooper, it may be valuable to shift to a goal-oriented perspective when designing scenarios for our personas. Why? Because they “are stable and permanent, but tasks are fluid, changeable and often unnecessary in…systems.” In addition, the tasks can ultimately change but the goals (i.e. the end result) often are much more static.
As an educator for over a decade, designing for goals makes sense to me. Due to changes in traditional education, I think we can also start thinking about goals in tandem with skills. In my current public speaking redesign, my students recently completed their first assignment of creating their LinkedIn Profile. There was a lot of scaffolding involved in the current design as students had three developmental assignments before they completed their profile:
- Researching entry-level positions in their field
- Headshot, cover photo, headline, and skills
- Writing their summary
To see how my students felt about this new type of assignment, I gave them the survey (in hopes of developing personas) I posted last week. The initial feedback has given me a lot of starting points for potential tweaks of not only the assignment but writing some better questions for the next survey.
Approximately 60% of the class gave feedback on the assignment which was more than I thought I would receive. It should also be noted that I also provide 5 points of extra credit to those who completed the survey. Of the respondents, all of them liked creating the profile for the first assignment. Some of the reasons given were:
“I really enjoyed it because it is an interactive assignment, and also it benefits me more than just a grade, but in a business sense“
“Yes! It was fun to make and helps others with their careers!“
“Yes, I enjoyed it. It gave us a speech assignment and allowed us to talk and give feedback on each other. I normally do not like projects they are a lot of work but doing it step by step was nice. I also like that we were able to incorporate speech as well as setting up a LinkedIn profile which is needed for a career.”
“I think it was a very helpful assignment! Not only did it help me create a profile which is going to be helpful in the long run, but I was able to get a more narrow idea of what area I want to go into once I graduate!”
Out of the respondents, half of the students had already started a profile. However,all of them found some value from the mini-assignments.
I had hoped the following questions would have been able to give me a bit more to work with to help develop personas.
While they do give me a few points of entry as public speaking is not a general education course. Therefore, students are either taking it as part of their major or for a different long-term goal. Also, public speaking anxiety (PSA) takes up a sizeable mental space in the traditional face-to-face course. However, student fears didn’t rate very high at least when reflecting upon the traditional curriculum.
I am already looking forward to and thinking about what the next iteration of this survey will look like. I realized I needed a more sophisticated survey function than the one provided on the LMS. It has also helped me to see some of the clunkiness in the questions. Finally, I would love to be able to follow up with some students about their answers but I am trying to think through how that would work within the framework of teaching their class.
