User Personas and Cultural Sensitivity

The Persona Problem
Well, where would I start? Most of the persona research is based more in UI design and user-centered design (UCD). this is more along the lines of "we are designing "such-and-such software" for so-and-so" (which is probably a lot of market demographic analysis). It is maybe more of a UI issue than an instructional design concern, at least in the formal literature. However, the idea of UCD could possibly link to instructional design, whereby the user on whom the design focuses becomes the learner persona. A product whose user is very specific will tend toward a more biased (?), or focused learner. But why is this necessary? What do you gain from this level of focus and attention on the person during training? Marketing a product and showing someone how to use the product certainly might be different in terms of defining audience (or is it?). Should it be? Those are the questions I'm looking to answer.

Concerns with the persona 
The Massanari article contains an excellent review of the concept of personas with both a critical lens and designers point of view. To summarize, the ideal user persona is developed, "defined with significant rigor and precision’ despite being imaginary." (Reimann & Cooper, 2003). If this is not done, then there is evidence (significant evidence) that the selection of a user ends up being somewhat arbitrary, and inevitably, based on on the designer's (or instructional designer's) inherent biases (all citations go here, but among them, Blomquist and Arvola, 2002). 

The persona as a concept, I'd argue, is pretty important because if it is not considered thoughtfully, it leads to a superficial result. Turner & Turner (2011) arrived at a similar conclusion, stating that, "The very cognitive economy associated with the use of personas impliesa lack of engagement with the characteristics of the people for whom they are designing." They go on further to dispute everybody's favorite citation, Pruitt & Grudin (2003), which suggested that the use of users personas increased engagement.

Unfortunately, much of the work done in "professional" settings is in fact done using only cognitive economy*. However, the question remains, is it important to have a persona rather than a defined "user" perspective in training materials? I think to answer that, we'd have to look at any evidence regarding effectiveness of user personas in learning. In their defense, however, they do mention, "Ethnographic data may help the most in developing realistic Personas, when available in sufficient depth" (Pruitt & Grudin 2003).

For practitioners of design and instructional material, I think Matthews et al (2012) provides the most informative study, in which several designers and UI experts shared their experiences and opinions of user personas. One designer rightly (in my opinion) points out one of the biggest weaknesses of user personas (from Matthews et al 2012):

"What I don't like is how distilling something into a persona, so for example if I'm making an e-commerce app and I can take all 40-something women shoppers in the Mid-West and turn that into 'Katie' my persona, I feel like the generalization that is being made at that point, makes me feel slightly uncomfortable, rather than just having the body of research to start with."

This designer was concerned with abstraction in persona use. Other key concerns other designers had were the misleading nature of personas, distraction in details and the overal impersonal nature of personas, Also from Matthews et al (2012). 

"I think there are a lot of subtlety or details, things that cannot be conveyed from the description... I don't think you can really think or act like [the persona]... To be frank I always have doubts about the persona and how they are going to be used… I feel like it's more of a communication tool."

Is learning really enhanced through personas? 
The literature is very empty here. I don't know if using a persona is effective in eLearning. How would you measure effectiveness anyway? You could conduct usability tests, or ask users if it made a difference to their perception during the learning process. It would be a great paper, or study, or something. Too bad my PhD isn't actually an EdD. But anyone who ever earned a PhD had to learn something about teaching and education, so I feel sort of ok about doing these lit searches and figuring it out on my own. I did find one PhD dissertation ( about eLearning and the user experience (Draper, 2015). The work there largely focuses around interviews with instructional designers and UX knowledge. Surprise surprise - it seems the instructional designers were largely ignorant about UX issues. Well my my my, it looks like there's a gap. There is a need for user interface awareness. If only UX were important in software. UX and ID are both kind of "soft" topics that many software engineers (excluding Steve Jobs, RIP) don't care too much about until they build the guts of everything. Maybe things have changed. I don't know. I kind of doubt it. 

I'm still digging through the literature on this one though, to be honest. In some ways, the general criticisms of the persona point to the shortcomings: it may stereotype, it may limit your audience, and it may be (as it is for me, personally) unneeded detail that is distracting from the learning objectives. 

Would I use a user persona?

Well, having had to go through the debate at work, I'm pretty comfortable saying that 1) I don't like detailed user personas (as predicted by Matthews et al) because they are distracting, and 2) I prefer a silhouetted persona as a symbol for a user, or learner. That's my personal take on it. That's what I thought before I wrote this, and I'm afraid that this giant lit search hasn't changed my mind. If anything, it's strengthened my position that user personas are gimmicky, distracting, but not entirely useless because I do find some value in silhouettes and representations of people. It helps me visualize a process or a scenario (oooh, scenario-based training is more my scene! Maybe another entry!?) 
* Definition of cognitive economy here.

Draper, C. D. (2015). Ships Passing in the Night? E-Learning Designers' Experiences with User Experience.

Elkina, M., & Pursian, A. (2012). Utilizing the Personas Concept as a Basis for Modeling Use Cases of a Learning Analytic Application.International Journal for Cross-Disciplinary Subjects İn Education (IJCDSE), 2, 935-942.

Maier, R., & Thalmann, S. (2010). Using personas for designing knowledge and learning services: results of an ethnographically informed study. International Journal of Technology Enhanced Learning, 2(1-2), 58-74.

Massanari, A. L. (2010). Designing for imaginary friends: information architecture, personas and the politics of user-centered design. New Media & Society, 12(3), 401-416.

Matthews, T., Judge, T., & Whittaker, S. (2012, May). How do designers and user experience professionals actually perceive and use personas?. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1219-1228). ACM.

Pruitt, J., & Grudin, J. (2003, June). Personas: practice and theory. In Proceedings of the 2003 conference on Designing for user experiences (pp. 1-15). ACM.

Reimann, R., & Cooper, A. (2003). About Face 2.0: The Essentials of Interaction Design. Editorial Wiley.

Turner, P., & Turner, S. (2011). Is stereotyping inevitable when designing with personas?. Design Studies, 32(1), 30-44.