Kearney (2002) talks about the double vision of narrative imagination: empathy and detachment. With similarities to Kouprie and Visser’s (2009) framework for empathy, one vision enables designers to empathize with the characters in a story who act and suffer, while the other vision provides designers with a certain aesthetic distance from which to view events unfolding. With stories, designers know what it is like to be in someone else’s head, shoes, or skin. The double attitude of empathy and detachment means designers are distanced, and designers are involved in the action to feel that both matter.

The “I-have-a-similar-story” reflections were particularly notable as designers spent time sharing stories that connected to personas’ stories. A designer named Carol wrote an 84-word reflection on how, like Mary, she was sensitive and artistic in high school. Carol also noted that she had a hard time connecting with most people. Yet another designer, Marcel, shared a 117-word story to illustrate his similarities to Crystalle. Marcel explained that he was indifferent in high school and that none of his teachers or courses “really [stuck] out as life changing.” Writing about a specific memory that resonated with the persona “Mary,” Leslie included a 485-word reflection on how, as an American student studying Spanish abroad, she found herself out of place and alone in Portugal with no way to communicate with people. Leslie ended her story explaining that “I can imagine that Mary, like any other immigrant to the U.S. without English skills, feels homesick and out of place frequently while living here.”

Because personas are qualitative instruments used in design processes and contextually describe people in specific situations, Vestergaard, Hauge, and Hansen (2016) call for rigorous published evaluations that are best achieved through case descriptions.

To create an empathy map, learning designers categorize interview notes based on what the interviewee was saying, doing, thinking, and feeling.

From an end-user perspective, activity theory describes the individual and his/her role as it relates to the intersection of tasks (activity) and group-level work (action). As s/he completes a given task with available tools, s/he engages in goal-directed behaviors through established rules, such as norms and processes. Alternatively, the community can connect to the object through division of labor (Yamagata-Lynch, 2010). The theory is thus descriptive in that it takes into consideration how individuals (a) manage the contextual constructs of division of labor, rules, and community and (b) employ technology for achieving specific outcomes.

Effective personas do five things (from the following website: https://edtechbooks.org/-bXV): Represent the majority of learners Focus on the major needs of the learner Provide clear understanding of the learners’ expectations Provide an aid to uncovering universal features Describe real individuals