W2.4 Personas & Force Maps

[Joshua Underwood]

A place for discussion and help around using Personas & Force Maps in design. Also, add links to your Personas and Force Maps to this thread.

Personas & Force Maps. Who is involved in your learning design? Why? What do they bring to your design? How will they interpret your design? What tensions & supportive relationships are there in the context of your design challenge? 

• Read the guidance and use the templates for using personas and force maps in scenarios. 
• Add your personas and force maps as clouds in this cloudscape and to your portfolio and/or display elsewhere. 

(Done Personas & Force Maps?) 

[Bob Ridge-Stearn]

Hi,

I came here looking for some discussion of personas but there seems not be one.

I've looked at some of the other people's personas on Cloudscape and I've skim read Lene Nielsen's book  (no time to do more than skim it on this MOOC) and just don't see how to make it practicable.

As far as I can see, creating personas is a way of seeing our students in ways that help us design the right learning environment for them.  We think about 'domains' (e.g. motivation might be one domain) and describe the student as seen through that lens.

However, this seems very time consuming even when you invent it rather than base the persona on facts.  It also seems simplistic and inaccurate but most of all it seems time consuming especially if a team of people is involved in writing up  the persona.

What do other people think?  I gave up trying to create personas but others didn't? Did it take you long?  Did you feel you gained something worthwhile from the exercise?  Would you suggest that in a real world scenario - at my institution - I encouraged academics in discipline areas to get together and create personas? 

Yet more questions!

Best wishes,

Bob Ridge-Stearn

[Cecilia Bernal]

Hi,

This is all new for me, so I'm reading every linked pages and trying to catch up. It seems a silly question, but I'd appreciate if someone could highlight it:

* When describing scenarios, one of the elements are Actors. Are they based on Persona's description? Or, the other way back: is a Persona the synthesis of an actor with goals, taking part of events, within a setting and involved with objects; in order to achieve a result?

Sorry, but I mix up concepts, this is part of learning ;)

Many thanks!

[Yishay Mor]

Hi Rob,

In a recent workshop, I asked participants to describe 3 personas in 15 minutes. I don't think that this counts as time consuming. However, it put our conversation on a completely different plane. First, it uncovered all our hidden assumptions and the discrepancies between them. Second, instead of arguing in abstract terms, the questions we were debating were: "but will this work for Pepita? does it address Costas' concern?"

Yes, you could construct a persona based on a meticulous ethnographic study of your target audience, but you can also construct her out of your intuitive knowledge of your domain. Of course the first would be more robust and scientifically valid, but the second would still offer you a means for making your tacit knowledge visible and taking a more systematic account of it.

Yishay

[Yishay Mor]

Hi Cecila,

I think the confusion arises from the fact that what you're seeing here is not one unified approach, but a sample of several related methods. So, although the terminology overlaps and the core ideas are similar, there are occasional gaps.

To answer your question, you could go either way. You could start by describing a brief scenario, then develop some of the actors into detailed personas, or you could start by describing a persona, then build a scenario around it.

Yishay

[Cristina Neto]

Hello, everybody

Yishay, I was thinking of building my persona from my personal knowledge of my audience. Since my project will be directed to primary and secondary education regular teachers, which is what I am, So, I was thinking of building my persona with the same difficulties and goals I experienced before I started studying Special Educational Needs, as I know my former colleagues felt the same. Did I make myself clear?

Also I don't really know what is meant by: "Precision, Not Accuracy". I don't quite understand the difference between Precision and Accuracy. Aren't they the same? Or is Accuracy more precise than Precision. The translator considers them synonimous.

Thank you

[Yishay Mor]

Hi Cristina,

You personal knowledge of your audience and your memories of your own experiences are excellent starting points. As I said, you could enhance these by using various research methods - observations, surveys, etc. But I suspect you probably won't have the time. Still, having the persona in front of your eyes is always better than in the back of your head.

"Precision, not accuracy" means that it is important that your persona "feels" like a real person, even if it does not reflect any particular real person. Why? because only then will you be able to relate to it as a person.

Yishay

[Cristina Neto]

Thank you Yishai

I just published my persona in Cloudworks, atttached it to your cloudscape Persona. Could you please take a look at it and comment, see if I'm doing it right. Many thanks.

[Yishay Mor]

Thanks Cristina,

Looks good! A picture always helps, but not critical. I added it to the "Personas, Force Maps and Scenarios" cloudscape.

Yishay

[Itana Maria Gimenes]

Hi,

I've been trying to touch all learning resources suggested. Haven't looked at alternatives as I do not have the time neither reason to try another method because it is already hard enough. There are many similarities with software design which make my life easier, like Personas are applied to design IT systems.

I've been following the template which does help to follow the tasks. We have now defined our context/scope, it took time, so it will be easier to proceed. Sometimes I feel a bit childish when writing scenarios and personas compared to what I usually do in drawing use cases for software design. However, there I've already have in mind what I should do. So, I faced the challenge. Now, we have several parts of the template done and a force map.

I have to look at EoR. I wonder how it will help the design in addition to the Personas and scenarios, I thought maybe it will help in thinking about the resources I should use to help the learners, what do you think?

Itana

[Joshua Underwood]

> I have to look at EoR. I wonder how it will help the design in addition to the Personas and scenarios, I thought maybe it will help in thinking about the resources I should use to help the learners, what do you think?

That will be interesting to see. I would expect using the EoR approach to help you focus on what sources of help might be available to learners, how interactions with these are filtered (constrained) and how your design might change access to the potential sources of help and encourage interaction with them.

[Jonathan Vernon]

I've come in a bit late to other insights on personas but have been exposed to them and used them extensively. The really great e-learning, the kind with a budget and the zeal of an advertiser behind it, is very user-centred. The personas, fictional constructs of the very people targetted, help make sure that the design and learning design team remember who they are creating for and therefore how differently these people will respond. You can olnly create empathy and therefore engagement by doing this.

[Ignatia/Inge de Waard]

There is something that interests me in persona's (embedded in any field). Although the persona's help to develop specific learning, it also in a way reconstructs how we perceive people or their persona. So in a way, if personae are used, it might be that a cliché is reproduced. 

This is of interest to me as I work with people from different cultures at times and sometimes while working with personae, I risked of making these persona archetypes of my own perception of others.... not sure if this makes sense :-D Linking it again to EoR, it might be of interest that the target population makes their personae, as such them being made participatively they might better reflect reality. But then again I TOTALLY agree that this will again add time to getting a result. Time is such a damper on things that need to be developed :-D

[Bob Ridge-Stearn]

Thanks, Yishay. Good to know that you can recommend the exercise from experience. Bob.

[Joshua Underwood]

Personally I think the thing about personas and scenarios is that they make these per-conceptions visible, through invitiing participation and comment we change and come to some kind of shared 'situation definition' in which all parties gain. 

Yep, design under real world constraints is a bummer :-(

[Yishay Mor]

Inga,

We used Personas in a recent workshop, asking participants to base them on real people they knew. You can also construct Personas from survey data, etc.

But even if all you capture is you prejudices - there is still value in making them visible and opening them for scrutiny.

Yishay

[Penny Bentley]

One of the joys of being an Educator is nurturing and bringing out the best in every student we teach. Designing learning tasks based on personas runs the risk of overlooking the potential of students whose abilities are masked by learning difficulties.

[Yishay Mor]

Not if you represent those students in your personas!

The risk of not designing to personas is that you either produce a "generic" design, which does not fit any particular student, or you're designing to a "hidden fantasy" student. i.e., you do have some image of a student in mind - but that image is invisible, and thus immune from scrutiny.

____________________
Dr. Yishay Mor
Senior Lecturer, Educational Technology
http://iet.open.ac.uk/people/yishay.mor
+44 1908 6 59373

 

On 15 February 2013 12:42, Penny Bentley <penben...@gmail.com> wrote:

One of the joys of being an Educator is nurturing and bringing out the best in every student we teach. Designing learning tasks based on personas runs the risk of overlooking the potential of students whose abilities are masked by learning difficulties.

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[Penny Bentley]

Yishay it's the students that come to us, such as those on the Autisum spectrum in particular, who see so much of what we do...through very different eyes. Apart from the generic "disabled child who needs learning intervention" persona, there isn't mush else to go on. The potential technology has to unlock the talents in ( and possibly the personas of?) these amazing students is exciting...iPads in the hands of Autistic children is going to change their learning experiences enormously, and should change we design them.

[Yishay Mor]

Penny,

I think addressing the needs of Autistic (and disabled) children is an important objective. And its something we need to design for - it doesn't just happen. 

If you're had one or two such children in your class, you can construct a persona from your memory of them. If you have more resources, you can refer to the scientific literature when you refine and elaborate such a persona. 

You might be interested in the ECHOES 2 project: http://echoes2.org/

Yishay

____________________
Dr. Yishay Mor
Senior Lecturer, Educational Technology
http://iet.open.ac.uk/people/yishay.mor
+44 1908 6 59373

On 15 February 2013 14:09, Penny Bentley <penben...@gmail.com> wrote:

Yishay it's the students that come to us, such as those on the Autisum spectrum in particular, who see so much of what we do...through very different eyes. Apart from the generic "disabled child who needs learning intervention" persona, there isn't mush else to go on. The potential technology has to unlock the talents in ( and possibly the personas of?) these amazing students is exciting...iPads in the hands of Autistic children is going to change their learning experiences enormously, and should change we design them.