Our team spent more than a year developing the personas found on this website. What began as a concept led to the formation of a team that spent months researching data, writing stories, and building the personas across multiple platforms. The following is a brief summary of this process that will hopefully provide you with some additional background information and context to consider when using these personas.
Step 1: Gather and Analyze Data
Although personas are fictional people, they are based on real data. Specifically, we looked at data from both Outreach Marketing and World Campus Disability Services across the following categories:
- Age
- Gender
- Typical accommodations
- Academic program
- Disability type
- Lived experiences
Marketing data gave us overall numbers and demographic information, and the Disability Services data gave us both qualitative and quantitative data about students with disabilities. We drew on several years’ worth of student feedback gained from interviews with students with disabilities combined with and informed by the personal and professional experiences of our persona team and our friends, family members, and coworkers with disabilities.
Step 2: Finalize Names, Ages, Photos, etc.
In this step, we took the data we had gathered to determine key details about each of our personas to make them as realistic as possible. We also looked at information from the U.S. Census Bureau to determine likely names for each persona based on their age.
Finding photographs for each persona was initially a challenge because we found several we liked that we did not have permission to use. Eventually, we found stock images that were available for use under a Creative Commons license.
Step 3: Choose a Template and Tool
When it came time to actually design the look of each persona we explored several templates and tools. Eventually, we settled on a tool called Xtensio that allowed us to create our personas in a template that resembled a social media profile. This was before we decided to move the Personas to the Sites at Penn State platform.
Step 4: Write Backstories and Fill Out Details
Once we had made the key decisions about each of our personas, we were able to get more creative and write backstories that highlighted personal details to make them feel more real. During this step, we also created lists of things that either frustrated or worked well for each persona in regards to their experience taking online courses.
Step 5: Review, Revise, and Repeat
This was an iterative process where each group member spent most of their time working on one or two personas, but we met regularly to review everyone’s work as a team. During this phase we offered feedback and made revisions to all of the personas to make sure we maintained a level of consistency and quality across each one. We also explored both simple designs and busier layouts with more details.
