Creating personae – Animated Inclusive Personae (Part 5)

by Katie Stripe, Imperial College London.

This post is the fifth of a series based on the Animated Inclusive Personae (AIP) project. The posts so far have covered generating images, the language we use, representation of disability, and the deployment of these characters in specific outputs. One question that has come up numerous times when speaking about this project is about how these characters are created, where the stories come from, and how much input others have. It is a difficult question to answer because there is no defined process on how to create these characters. There are structural components, defined by the project, which give a level of uniformity to the output. These are based on UX design principles like those found on the Adobe Blog: Putting Personas to Work in UX Design. However as each persona, or set of personae, is made in collaboration with, and to meet the specific needs of, a certain department or project,it is necessary that the way they are developed will change, and the people that provide input will differ. Despite the varying circumstances, it is possible to split these into broad categories, as with previous posts I will describe these different scenarios using the personae characters.

The original characters that sparked this project were developed for an online, not-for-credit, self-enrolment course for postgraduate students. These original characters had a very simple role in the course which was to provide cohort specific examples. Christina (drawn by Ksenia) was one of the first characters to be created.

Christina Jai
Preferred name: Chris
Details: 24, from Medway, UK
Imperial Course: MSc Genes, Drugs and Stem Cells
Optional Modules: Attributes and Aspirations
Previous Education: BSc (Hons) Biological Sciences, University of Leeds, 1st
Tags: Home, PGT, FoM, LGBTQ+

She was developed as a user experience personae to help us identify the needs and motivations of those who would be taking the Attributes and Aspirations (AA) short course. This design session surfaced three archetypal students that we needed to cater for when designing our course. In a normal user design process, we would have used this as a resource on which to build out content. Instead, we decided to integrate these students into the course as pseudo peers, as a narrative instrument, and as a way of providing exemplar content. We created a fourth personae at this stage to make a deliberate effort at gender balance and this is what sparked the journey into Inclusive Personae.

As part of the AA course, we developed exemplar CVs for our students and were able to give them certain characteristics like religion, mental health problems, or in Chris’s case involvement in an LGBTQ+ society. Her main role as a character was to present exemplar content. However the subtle inclusion of her links to the LGBTQ+ community were enough to give the character some diversity and to show the community that we had considered them. The majority of her story, however, was around her career planning and this information we gained from subject experts in the careers service. Staff have a much broader knowledge of students’ motivations and frustrations from years of working with different cohorts. This makes them an extremely valuable human data source.

The second example of these personae is one which addresses common issues for a certain cohort of students. For example, Karl (drawn by Kate).

Karl Hassan
Details: 22 from Belfast, with Syrian parents
Imperial Course: BSc Biological Sciences
Optional Modules: Imperial Award
Job: Bike courier
Tags: Home, UG, Muslim

He was developed to help share information on issues specific to Muslim students. Much like the characters in post three who all share aspects of disability were created with the institution’s Disability Advisory Service, Karl was developed with our student service desk and student finance teams to help share information on the challenges that Muslim students face particularly around finance and student loans.

This story, again, comes from a human database of knowledge around what questions students ask around different situations and scenarios. The information that has been delivered through this persona however is not personal. Like the teaching content above it will get sense checked and validated by student groups, usually paid consultants, but the content is information that is readily available on the college webpages or on the wider web. The reason for presenting information in this way through the personae is twofold: Like Chris it shows underrepresented groups that we have thought of you and we want to cater for you. The additional layer here is that we also want to share information with the wider community (staff and students) which may help with cultural understanding, for example elements of Muslim law that restrict borrowing.

These two types of personae are simple to create and need limited input from the communities that they represent as their main function is simply to exist. As a creator, and as someone who cares about wide ranging visibility across the whole project this is comfortable and relatively safe, from an individual perspective. To this point, working with colleagues who are experts in their fields, we have reached a good place: Highlighting information or communities in a general way can often be done with minimal risk of causing offence and without necessarily requiring direct representation.

However, we can do more. We can tell more stories. But that is when it gets difficult, morally, and ethically, to do it well and to do it safely. To tell more personal stories we need to go to those communities and ask for the stories and that can be a burden on those people. We do not have all the answers on how to do this but we have some ideas, and some plans for the future. That is stage three, and characters like Karl, and the three students with disabilities will be part of that. We have ambition, and some colleagues in the student union who want to help us tell those stories so phase three, maybe, will be Flo (drawn by Mingke).

Jake Flockett
Preferred name: Flo
Details: 18 years old from London, UK
Imperial Course: MEng Mechanical Engineering
Optional Modules: Attributes and Aspirations
Clubs and Societies: Mech Eng Soc
Job: Part-time shift manager at his local Co-Op
Tags: Home, UG, full-time, FiF, commuter

I hope that we will be able to explore some stories about the difficulties faced by first in family students like Flo when it comes to institutional belonging and why they need to work alongside studying. These are important stories to tell, they combine the representation given by Chris, the element of cultural understanding that is seen with Karl, and the real, personal stories that we can tell without asking our students to take on too much of that emotional load. I don’t know how, or if it will work, but I am prepared to try in a way which makes sure our students, particularly those we want to represent, are safe, supported, and ultimately feel like they belong.

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