Authentic to Whose Story?

1. Watch this short video to better understand this resource:

3. Scroll down to read through the practical advice and processes of the Adobe UX design team. Then, open and use the KPU Personas Worksheet to begin defining 3-4 learner archetypes of your own.

2. Explore students as protagonists:

stdnt protag

McKee, R. (1999). Story: Substance, structure, style, and the principles of screenwriting. Methuen Publishing

Persona Creation by Adobe User Experience (UX) Design

Why are they important?

“User personas help a product team find the answer to one of their most important questions, “Who are we designing for?” By understanding the expectations, concerns, and motivations of target users, it’s possible to design a product that will satisfy users’ needs and therefore be successful.”

Build Empathy

“Empathy is a core value if designers want to make something that is good for the people who are going to use it. Personas help designers to create understanding and empathy with the end-users.

Thanks to personas designers can:

  • Gain a perspective similar to the user. Creating user personas can help designers step out of themselves and recognize that different people have different needs and expectations. By thinking about the needs of a fictional persona, designers may be better able to infer what a real person might need.
  • Identify with the user they are designing for. The more designers engage with the user personas and see them as real people, the more likely they will be to consider them during the design process and want to create the best product for them.”

Good Characteristics of Personas


  1. Personas aren’t fictional guesses at what a target user thinks. Every aspect of a persona’s description should be tied back to real data (observed and researched).
  2. Personas reflect real user patterns, not different user roles. Personas aren’t a reflection of roles within a system.
  3. A persona focuses on the current state (how users interact with a product), not the future (how users will interact with a product).
  4. A persona is context-specific (it’s focused on the behaviors and goals related to the specific domain of a product).”
KPU General Demographics
KPU Diversity Demographics

Faller, P. (2019, December 17). What are user personas and why are they important? | Adobe XD ideas. Ideas. https://xd.adobe.com/ideas/process/user-research/putting-personas-to-work-in-ux-design/

Ask Yourself: How clearly do you see your students represented in this data?

Five Steps to Creating User Personas

The first step is to conduct user research to understand the target audience’s mindsets, motivations, and behaviors. The most accurate personas are based on actual field research — they are distilled from in-depth user interviews and observation data of real users. It’s essential to collect as much information and knowledge about users as possible by interviewing and/or observing a sufficient number of people who represent a target audience. The more a researcher observes and captures during these interviews, the more realistic the persona will be.

In a case when it’s impossible to interview/observe real individuals — time and money don’t allow for the user research needed to define accurate personas — it’s still possible to create a persona based on what the team knows about users. If your product is available on the market and has real users, you can rely on customer support logs and web analytics to create a persona. A persona created using this approach is known as a provisional persona, and is a great placeholder until real personas are created.

During this step, it is very important to avoid generating user personas of stereotypical users (users that don’t have any relation to the actual user’s reality). Completely fictional stories of imaginary people based on little or no research bring no value for the design process and in fact, can bring harm. Furthermore, poorly constructed personas can easily undermine the credibility of this technique.

The next step is analyzing research findings. The goal during this step is to find patterns in user research data that make it possible to group similar people together into types of users. There’s a simple strategy suggested by Kim Goodwin:

• Once the research is finished, list all of the behavioral variables (i.e. ways in which users’ behavior differed).

• Map each interviewee (or real-life user attributes) against the appropriate set of variables.

• Identify trends (find a set of people clustering across six or eight variables). These grouping trends will then form the basis of each persona.

Next, it’s important to assemble a persona’s descriptions around behavioral patterns. The researcher’s task here is to describe each persona in such a way that expresses enough understanding and empathy to understand the users. During this step, it’s best to avoid the temptation to add a lot of personal details: one or two bits of personality can bring a persona to life, but too many details will be distracting and will make the persona less credible as an analytical tool. Don Norman put it this way: “[personas] only need to be realistic, not real, not necessarily even accurate (as long as they accurately characterize the user base).”

Quite often, researchers create more than one persona for each product. Most interactive products have multiple audience user segments which is why it seems logical to construct multiple personas. However, with too many personas, the process can get out of hand. The personas can simply blur together. That’s why during this step it’s also important to minimize the number of user personas, so it’s possible to focus on design—and this may guarantee better success. While there’s no magic number, as a rule of thumb, three or four personas are enough for most projects.

Tip: If you have more than one persona it’s good to define the primary persona (the most relevant) and follow the rule “design for the primary – accommodate the secondary.” Design decisions should be made with the primary persona in mind and then tested (through a thought experiment) against the secondary personas.

Personas have no value in and of themselves. They become valuable only when they tied up to a scenario. A scenario is an imagined situation that describes how a persona would interact with a product in a particular context to achieve its end goal(s). Scenarios help designers understand the main user flows – by pairing the user personas with the scenarios, designers gather requirements, and from those requirements, they create design solutions. Scenarios should be written from the persona’s perspective, usually at a high level, and articulate use cases that will likely happen.

Socializing personas among stakeholders are critical in moving the design team toward action. All team members and stakeholders should have a positive association with personas and see the value in them. As people become familiar with the personas, they start talking about them as if they were actual people. A well-constructed persona almost becomes another member of the team.

Tip: Usually, having posters, cards, action figures, and other real, physical objects is more effective to communicate personas and helps keep them top of mind versus having a digital version, like a doc file or PowerPoint presentation.

Faller, P. (2019, December 17). What are user personas and why are they important? | Adobe XD ideas. Ideas. https://xd.adobe.com/ideas/process/user-research/putting-personas-to-work-in-ux-design/

Content to Create Personas

  • Persona name
  • Photo
  • Demographics (gender, age, location, marital status, family)
  • Goals and needs
  • Frustrations (or “pain points”)
  • Behaviors
  • Bits of personality (e.g. a quote or slogan that captures the personality)

“Generally, when creating a user persona template you should include the following information:

Tip: Avoid using real names or details of research participants or people you know. This can bias the objectivity of your user personas (you’ll focus on design for this person, rather than a group of people with similar characteristics).”

Faller, P. (2019, December 17). What are user personas and why are they important? | Adobe XD ideas. Ideas. https://xd.adobe.com/ideas/process/user-research/putting-personas-to-work-in-ux-design/

Example Buyer Personas

Shore, J. (n.d.). 3 examples of buyer personas to help you create your own. Inbound Marketing Agency | SmartBug Media®. https://www.smartbugmedia.com/blog/3-examples-of-buyer-personas-to-help-you-create-your-own

OToole, C. (2021, February 18). How to create data-driven student personas for higher education marketing [+ examples!]. Thinking Cap Agency. https://www.thinkingcapagency.com/blog/data-driven-student-personas/

Activity #2 – Defining Learner Archetypes

Instructions: Click for a worksheet to help clarify learner archetypes.

KPU Personas Worksheet

Step 2: Plot the Macro-Storyline

Go to Step 2 in the Story Refinement Process