Human-centered research often prioritizes results. In this blog, Manuela reflects on the impact of personas, reminding researchers and academics that it is necessary to highlight the humanity of their sources when presenting their results.
Written by Manuela Mora Castillo, Blog Editor & Content Writer, Honours Bachelor of Arts, Political Science and History Double Major, Latin American Studies Minor
For years, storytelling has been very dear to me. As a young reader, I used to love, dread, and admire the characters I encountered in my favorite novels, with complex emotions and motivations that helped me relate and connect to them. When I joined the Innovation Hub, I was suddenly reacquainted with storytelling through the form of personas.
Personas are aggregates of real experiences from real people. Personas are a way to share data in a format that feels distinctly personal and human, reminding us that the information collected in human-centered research speaks, first and foremost, about people. Through personas, I learned that data isn’t just facts or numbers; data is also stories, experiences and emotions, which personas help to highlight.
Names and Traits: Personas Are People Too!
There are many ways for us to remember characters. Some focus on their clothes, or their amazing one-liners. Personally, I usually pay attention to their names. Something that surprised me from learning about personas was the importance of names, as I had not really thought about them before. I realized that names are more than just a categorization device for students – they are the first thing we learn about them, and it helps us first connect and empathize with them. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that there are stories and experiences behind each name.
When we name personas, we also personalize them. Through the process of naming a persona, illustrating their interests, and writing from their perspective, audiences invest emotionally in their journey. We become keen to learn about their experiences, the good and the bad, and hope to see their challenges resolved. This is the basis for the rest of their story.
Using Language to Humanize Characters
As any creative writer will know, the making of interesting characters also relies on the language we use to describe them. Are we making them feel warm and inviting? Are we conveying their candid struggles? Personas require us to think about how we can best convey data in the form of stories and experiences to tell a story that readers can connect with. Language is key to telling a good story!
Language has the power to inspire and create change. By paying attention to personas’ vocabulary, we frame them as relatable people and create empathy for them, ensuring that personas go beyond their fictional existence and generate a real, emotional response in the reader. Being able to evoke an emotional response in the reader is what makes personas (and storytelling in research) unique – because these emotions can directly inspire the reader, compelling them into action. Although words are one way to create change, their impact is felt much more deeply than numbers because they are relatable to us. We may not remember a fact, but we do remember how our favourite character in a book we recently read overcame their challenge and how they felt about it. This is the power of human-centered storytelling!
The Complexity of Human Experiences
The final piece in the construction of someone’s story is their journey. What experiences, if any, shaped them? Who were they before, and is it different to who they are now? Who will they become? Everyone experiences different circumstances, and their journeys are long travels. I see the best stories as ones where the characters imitate the complexity of human experiences.
What I like about personas is that by listening to multiple students’ stories and combining them into one individual, they aim to replicate the diversity of student experiences. I love that they detail, implicitly, that students are not identical and that their time at U of T is often a winding, layered path. Personas can unite these diverse experiences by creating a character that speaks to some of these experiences, reminding us that students can (and often do) face more than one challenge. I realized that there is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ narrative in the creation of personas since they actively challenge the model of the “perfect” student.
Yet, personas remind us that people were not meant to be separated in such a way, and that we all fit into more than one box. Personas urge us to remember that we are each complex and rich with stories, experiences, emotions, identities, challenges, and opportunities!
From Presenting Data to Storytelling Data
As a researcher who appreciates creative writing, I learned that personas can be a powerful storytelling tool. They help us humanize data and stories, translating them into not-so fictional characters that we see ourselves in. Personas are just one of the many other approaches to humanizing data to build empathy that we can explore as storytellers. As a result, readers are able to see parts of themselves reflected through the stories and experiences of others. Who does not love a story that they relate to?
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