Review your design with simulated personas and personalise your own

Overview

By the end of this article you will be able to use the built-in simulated learners, powered by the Coursensu AI co-pilot, to review your designs. You'll be able to identify the built-in review criteria for each person and how their feedback can help you make more informed decisions.

You'll be able to personalise and add custom simulated review personas that meet your own requirements. These could be more refined simulated learners or other stakeholders such as a Manager, Content Producer or Subject Expert. 

The goal with simulated review personas is to give you the ability to automatically check your design against a set criteria and receive personalised, immediate feedback as often as you need.

Contains

• Built-in personas - where to find the feature and get instant feedback on your design.
• Persona review criteria - what the built-in persona are using to inform their simulated learner feedback.
• Personalising / adding your own criteria - how to add a new persona to meet your needs.

Terminology

• Persona - a generalised example of someone who is your target audience / user. Includes context, background and goals.
• Simulated - the persona is generalised and their feedback is simulated based on criteria, this isn't in place of a real person's feedback, it's an indicative method that feeds into a wider process of review and iteration.
• Co-pilot - Coursensu's AI-powered learning design assistant. 

Ready? Let's get rich design feedback ⚡️

Using the built-in personas for instant design feedback

Step: Navigate to your design and select the Review button in the toolbar

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Step: Select Co-pilot 'learner' feedback and then pick a built-in learner from the Review as (role) list

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Select one of the four persona's (we'll cover them individually in the next section).

Step: Wait for the co-pilot to generate your feedback

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Tip: Depending on the size of your design, and network traffic, this can take a few seconds. 

Step: Review the feedback you have received from your simulated learner

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Tip: The built-in personas are always going to suggest improvements, they are designed to always offer more constructive feedback.

Built-in simulated learner persona review criteria

There are four built-in personas:

• Higher Education Student
• Workplace Professional
  
• Casual Lifelong Learner
  
• Skills-Focused Learner
  

Each persona provides design feedback based on the following criteria: 

1. Accessibility, inclusivity and equity of the learning for all learners.
2. The digital experience, use of technologies and if it will create opportunities or potential barriers.
3. Timing / duration and if there is enough time-on-task, as well as built in flexibility.
4. Balance in learning formats or active learning strategies.
5. How the learning and assessment prepares learners for future development and impact in work or study.
6. Clarity of the Sections and Content Items (order, structure, flow).
7. Relevance - delivery of relevant content, how it'll be presented and easily updated.
8. Adaptability to individual learners' needs or requirements.
9. Learner support for skills, behaviours, knowledge, competencies, technical issues. 
10. Community between learners, educators and the organisation delivering the course.

Note: The criteria vary across each persona but all follow the broad structure summarised above.

Personalising and adding your own review persona

Pro and Team users can add their own persona, to simulate feedback from your stakeholders.

Tip: This may vary between project, but currently all Persona created will be available to everyone in your team, for every design. 

Step: Navigate to your Team area and then select the Co-pilot tuning tab

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Step: Add a new Persona - all you need is a Name and the Guidance. Writing the guidance is the tricky part!

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Step: Write suitable guidance for your persona. 

Tips: You'll want to consider who the typical person is when writing a persona. 

Every persona you create should consist of a few key components. You'll want your personas to provide feedback on your design in a meaningful way, and the AI co-pilot can simulate feedback based on the information you provided it.

Consider starting with a real person in mind:

Who are they? Your persona should summarise up who the person is and their context or situation. For example, you may want to add that they are looking through a learning design before it goes into production.

What are the goals? Your persona's goals will state their reason for taking your course / learning experience. For example, our reviewer may be a past learner, a colleague or a close collaborator working with you to design an exceptional learning experience.

What are their pain points, problems or challenges? These are all barriers or problems that you want to address before production! Use the persona to help spot problems early, turning them into an opportunity to quickly resolve them. For example, our research into previous learners may always mention assessments and we can build this into our persona to check for the assessment items and how they align with the learning activities planned.

A great workflow to create a persona is: 

1. Consider a real person - research them and their needs and common challenges.
2. Analyse what you know about your persona - find trends or patterns.
3. Create your persona - add as much guidance as you need.
4. Test the persona with a mature design - save the feedback and compare as you go.
5. Update your persona guidance - the more you learn, the more you can refine.

Tip: Don't try to perfect a persona on the first go. Set a few up, try them on a design and iterate a few times and see their helpfulness increase.

Step: You'll find your custom Personas in the Review screen (see above) and listed under 'Your co-pilot personas'

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Top 3 next steps

1. Research your stakeholders and select a persona
2. Review your default design criteria and how they compare to your persona
3. Customise Coursensu's review tools to fit your needs!