Considerations for the Use of Personas and Journey Maps in Engineering Course Design

Nicholas Fila; Diane Rover; Henry Duwe; Mani Mina

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Conference: 2022 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition
Location: Minneapolis, MN
Publication Date: August 23, 2022
Start Date: June 26, 2022
End Date: June 29, 2022
Conference Session: DEED Technical Session 10: Empathy and Human-centered Design
Page Count: 22
DOI: 10.18260/1-2--41746
Permanent URL: https://peer.asee.org/41746
Download Count: 636

Diane Rover is a University Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Iowa State University. She has held various faculty and administrative appointments at ISU and Michigan State University since 1991. She received the B.S. in computer science and the M.S. and Ph.D. in computer engineering. Her teaching and research have focused on engineering education, embedded computer systems, reconfigurable hardware, parallel and distributed systems, visualization, and performance monitoring and evaluation. She has held officer positions in the ASEE ECE Division, served as an associate editor for the ASEE Journal of Engineering Education and the IEEE Transactions on Education, and served on the IEEE Committee on Engineering Accreditation Activities, the IEEE Education Society Board of Governors, the ABET EAC, and EAC Executive Committee. Dr. Rover is a Fellow of the IEEE and of ASEE.

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Henry Duwe Iowa State University of Science and Technology

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Mani Mina Iowa State University of Science and Technology

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Mani Mina is with the Departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Industrial Design at Iowa State University

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Abstract

Personas and journey maps are ubiquitous in many design disciplines. These tools allow designers to better understand key users and engage with a user’s experience over time with a product or system. While personas and journey maps are widely used in design disciplines, little scholarship exists on how they, collectively, might be successfully adapted to different contexts, e.g., engineering instruction and course development. Yet, these tools have the potential to help educators better understand students’ experiences during a learning activity, class session, semester, or even an entire curriculum, and identify key issues to address as they develop or revise new learning experiences. This paper presents three case studies of the persona and journey map creation among engineering educators, explores their effects on educator empathy, and investigates factors that may influence their successful implementation in engineering course design settings. Each case features some variation on the format of personas and journey maps. We utilize several data sources to achieve a comprehensive snapshot of each case, including audio recordings of team course design meetings, persona and journey map artifacts, course data, and researcher observations. We present each case individually and identify themes that run across the implementations. These themes include the importance of instructor involvement in the creation process, the effect of diverse voices in the creation process, and the role of play, as well as relevant trade-offs in each of these themes.

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Fila, N., & Rover, D., & Duwe, H., & Mina, M. (2022, August), Considerations for the Use of Personas and Journey Maps in Engineering Course Design Paper presented at 2022 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Minneapolis, MN. 10.18260/1-2--41746