User Research
It seems like we are reminded every 5 minutes to “start with the learner”. And rightly so. There have been many methods and ideas around conducting research and analysis of our learners. With this as another reminder, we’re not suggesting that you go and and conduct more research on your learners. What we can do is incorporate User Experience (UX) User Research methods into our learner analysis, not only from a task and topic analysis, but an overall user experience analysis.
This is also a reminder that our users, although they predominantly consist of the learner, can also consist of management, learner’s supervisors and team leaders, and other stakeholders. Some of these stakeholders may be required to undertake administration tasks for the employees, and they may use things like the Learning Management system to run reports or check up on their employee’s learning activities. The experience that all users have with us, whether they are learners or not, will need to be taken into account.
The first step in the User Experience design process is to conduct User research. As a result of conducting our research, we come up with Personas. Did you know that the word Persona is derived from Latin, where it originally referred to a theatrical mask. “A persona, in user-centered design and marketing is a fictional character created to represent a user type that might use a site, brand, or product in a similar way.”
From Wikipedia
As we explore the User Experience journey more we realise the many similarities between our more traditional learning design processes and the User Experience design process.
Putting Personas to Work in UX Design: What They Are and Why They’re Important
From the Adobe website
How To Create User Personas
This article from Guroo Producer looks at how we can use the same principles for creating user personas in UX, to creating learner personas in our learning design process.
10 tips for creating realistic, empathy-driven learner personas
“At Guroo Producer™️ we are helping people create better learning, in a better way”
This PDF is the result of conducting user research for our Adobe Captivate course. Feel free to download and use this document as inspiration for the final output you are aiming for when conducting your user research. A reminder that these individuals don’t actually exist, they are “made-up” (based on our research) to represent the type of user that will undertake our learning.