When designing learning, it’s easy to get so focused on the content and goals that you forget about the learners. Following a “content is king” approach without focusing on your learners can create learning that subject matter experts and stakeholders love but doesn’t help learners learn—or even makes it difficult to learn! Identifying some audience characteristics during an initial analysis helps but doesn’t go far enough to keep the learners alive and in-focus as you build learning and make myriad design decisions that have the potential to hinder learning. King content can prevent or destroy effective learning! Unleash the power of personas!!  

In this session we’ll discuss why personas are effective and provide tips, templates, and best practices you can start using right away to create and apply these powerful tools in your learning design processes. We’ll discuss the research demonstrating how personas streamline and make your learning design process and the learning experiences you create more effective for learners. We’ll explore examples from various industries to illustrate how you can create different types of personas and apply them throughout learning design process to provide powerful learning results. We’ll practice creating a plan to gather information about your audience and deciding which characteristics (including roles, tasks, comfort/emotions, motivations, environments, and others) to use to develop your personas so your design supports your learners and achieves learning objectives. You’ll complete an activity to practice creating personas and applying them to design decisions and receive templates and samples to start using in your own design work right away.

In this session you will learn:

• Why personas are powerful tools in designing effective learning experiences for your learners
• What makes a useful persona, including relatability, relevance to learning objectives, and correct level of detail
• Multiple real-life examples of how personas can be implemented into learning design process to create powerful learning experiences
• The best ways to gather information to create personas, including analyzing data, empathizing, and interviewing
• How to create personas, including identifying key characteristics and differentiators that relate to learning objectives
• How to start immediately using templates, tips, and best practices to implement personas in your learning design processes

Technology discussed:

Various digital persona template resources