Considerations for the Use of Personas and Journey Maps in Engineering Course Design
Nicholas D. Fila, Diane T. Rover, Henry Duwe, Mani Mina · 2024
Personas and journey maps are ubiquitous in many design disciplines.These tools allow designers to better understand key users and engage with a user's experience over time with a product or system.While personas and journey maps are widely used in design disciplines, little scholarship exists on how they, collectively, might be successfully adapted to different contexts, e.g., engineering instruction and course development.Yet, these tools have the potential to help educators better understand students' experiences during a learning activity, class session, semester, or even an entire curriculum, and identify key issues to address as they develop or revise new learning experiences.This paper presents three case studies of the persona and journey map creation among engineering educators, explores their effects on educator empathy, and investigates factors that may influence their successful implementation in engineering course design settings.Each case features some variation on the format of personas and journey maps.We utilize several data sources to achieve a comprehensive snapshot of each case, including audio recordings of team course design meetings, persona and journey map artifacts, course data, and researcher observations.We present each case individually and identify themes that run across the implementations.These themes include the importance of instructor involvement in the creation process, the effect of diverse voices in the creation process, and the role of play, as well as relevant trade-offs in each of these themes.