More than just a persona: a life study of our users.
For this project with Cengage Education, I took on multiple roles: researcher, interviewer, and designer. We worked to develop detailed personas capturing the core needs, motivations, and pain points of our target users. Our process involved the following:
Conducted in-depth user interviews with both students and instructors to surface qualitative insights that data driven methods would have missed.
Synthesized interview findings into detailed personas, translating raw user feedback into actionable profiles that grounded the team in real user needs.
Delivered research outcomes that positioned the Cengage team to pursue more user-centric solutions across their education product suite.
Project Background
Cengage Education sought to deepen their understanding of their key user groups, teachers and students, through comprehensive, research driven personas. I was brought onto this project for my expertise in user research, design and attention to detail. Cengage recognized the need for more thorough and actionable personas that could serve as a foundation for designing and refining future products. By providing a clear, nuanced view of these user groups, the project aimed to equip Cengage with the tools to create more empathetic, user-centered solutions for the education space.
Process
1. Project Scoping and Alignment
Established a clear project overview, defining goals and scoping the work to ensure the team had a shared understanding of what needed to be accomplished.
Maintained alignment throughout the project with regular checkpoints, keeping stakeholders informed and the work on track.
Reviewed existing personas to understand what had been done previously, using them as a informed starting point for new research rather than starting from scratch.
2. Research and Interviews
Crafted targeted interview questions designed to surface the deep, qualitative insights needed to build meaningful personas.
Profiled and selected a diverse mix of interviewees: teachers and students spanning a wide range of experiences.
Conducted in-depth interviews, focusing on uncovering the motivations, challenges, and needs that shape how students and instructors engage with Cengage products.
3. Analysis and Synthesis
Analyzed interview data to identify key patterns and insights, translating raw findings into clear, actionable takeaways.
Reported findings back to stakeholders, ensuring the team understood the research outcomes and how they would inform future product development decisions.
Updated and refined the personas to be as comprehensive and useful as possible, equipping the Cengage team with durable tools for ongoing user centric decision making.
4. Visual Design and Storytelling
Selected representative personas that authentically reflected the diversity and range of Cengage's core user groups.
Brought each persona to life through deliberate visual storytelling: depicting users in the context of their real lives, whether attending class, teaching, completing homework, or balancing a job alongside their studies.
Applied my own artistic skills to design original landscapes and visual environments, creating a cohesive, narrative-driven presentation that made the personas feel human and immediate rather than clinical or abstract.
Execution
Executing this work required a mix of careful planning, communication, and attention to detail. I started by reviewing the existing persona work to align with the new project goals and refine the personas. This helped ensure we weren’t duplicating efforts and filled in any gaps.
Creating the interview questions was a key step, ensuring they were open-ended yet targeted to address our core areas of interest. Profiling the interviewees to form a diverse group was also critical to reflect the full range of teachers and students. Coordinating the interviews and analyzing the collected data was a major part of the process.
Once the research was analyzed, I worked on reporting the findings in a clear and actionable way for stakeholders. Throughout, collaborating with the team was essential to stay on track and aligned with the project goals. Altogether, the process required strategic thinking, research skills, and design expertise to create thorough and practical personas for Cengage’s future product development.
Analysis & Insights
One of the biggest revelations was the unexpected overlap between certain personas: while these personas were initially thought to be distinct, our findings showed they shared more similarities than anticipated, prompting us to rethink and adjust their designs to reflect this complexity.
We also discovered new layers of complexity within the personas themselves: assumptions that guided earlier persona work were often disproven. For instance, the impact of external factors like COVID-19, the rise of remote learning, the rapid integration of AI, and the increasing cost of education reshaped the way many of these individuals approached learning and teaching. These shifts meant that education was no longer seen as a straightforward concept, and our personas had to reflect their evolving priorities, challenges, and attitudes toward these changes.
Ultimately, this new understanding enriched the personas by making them more accurate and representative of the real-world context.
Conclusion
This project was such a rewarding experience, combining in-depth research, thoughtful design, and a lot of teamwork to create personas that truly capture the changing world of education. The research team was thrilled with the results, praising the depth and accuracy of the insights, which was so great to hear after all the effort that went into it.
The design and product teams are equally excited to use these updated personas in their future projects, which makes all the work feel even more impactful. These personas are set to become a key resource for Cengage, helping them create better, more user-focused solutions that truly meet the needs of educators and students in an ever changing educational landscape.