Persona Discovery Overview

The prior Visual Thinking exercise allowed you to practice persona discovery and empathy for an unidentified group of people. Now, let's focus our attention on the persona discovery of your target audience of learners.

What is persona discovery?

In design, understanding and focusing on the end user during the entire design process is essential to the success of the final product. This is no different when designing instruction. Who is our audience? This goes beyond demographics, such as gender, age, work experience, and education. We need to gain empathy with our audience for whom we are designing and construct personas. The core concept of empathy is the ability to emotionally identify with another. Written in narrative, personas are fictitious representations of our learners intended to convey their hopes, dreams and fears, and what they want to accomplish. Through personas, we have empathy for our real learners and we use this empathic link to make all our design decisions in light of how it impacts our learners. When we walk in the shoes of our learners, we design with a holistic view of our audience. This is what instructional design is all about.

Persona Discovery: Your Learners

A host of hopes, dreams, fears, and what they want to accomplish differentiate our potential target audience of learners. To help us discover our personas, a panel of subject matter experts (SMEs) in adult education worked with us to develop six personas that represent our target audience. Again, these personas do not describe actual people. Instead, each persona is discovered to accurately represent the learners who will take a high school equivalency exam and who may benefit from the instruction you will be developing. Please take time to read and reflect on each of the six learner personas linked within the exhibit below. As we will refer to these personas frequently throughout the course, you may find it helpful to print them for your reference.

Learner Personas

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