Oct. 1, 2025
Needs Analysis and Learner Personas: Your Secret Weapon for Effective Learning
What happens when you launch a learning experience that misses the mark despite solid content? The critical missing ingredient might be a deep understanding of your audience. In this episode, we explore the often-overlooked foundation of effective instructional design: learner needs assessment and persona creation.
Drawing from years of experience, Jackie breaks down why understanding your audience is step one of truly human-centered design. She explores five practical methods for assessing learner needs.
The heart of this message resonates with Steve Jobs' wisdom: "Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works." Whether you're creating corporate training, higher education courses, or K-12 curriculum, this approach transforms your work from information presentation to problem-solving that genuinely serves your learners' needs.
🔗 Episode Links:
Please check out the resources mentioned in the episode. Enjoy!
Assessing Learner Needs and Personas Infographic
7taps Learner Persona Template
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00:01 - Welcome and Episode Introduction
00:53 - Understanding Learner Needs Assessment
01:32 - Five Methods for Assessing Needs
02:46 - Creating Effective Learner Personas
04:14 - Tools for Building Learner Personas
05:25 - Design Challenge and Closing Thoughts
07:30 - Support and Final Quote
WEBVTT
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Hello and welcome to the Designing with Love podcast.
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I am your host, Jackie Pelegrin, where my goal is to bring you information, tips, and tricks as an instructional designer.
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Hello, GCU students, alumni, and fellow educators, welcome to episode 51 of the Designing with Love podcast.
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In this episode, I will discuss something foundational, something every instructional designer should be doing, but often gets skipped in the rush to meet deadlines, assessing learner needs, and creating effective learner personas.
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If you've ever launched a learning experience and found that it missed the mark, not because the content wasn't good, but because it didn't connect with your audience, then this episode is for you.
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So let's dive into why understanding your learners is step one of a truly human-centered design.
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Instructional design isn't just about putting information together.
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It's about solving learning problems, and to solve a problem, you first need to understand it.
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Assessing learner needs helps us understand questions like: What does my audience already know?
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What do they need to know to succeed, and what's getting in their way of truly understanding the content?
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Whether you're creating training for new employees, developing an online course for adult learners, or working on a K-12 curriculum, these needs assessments are the compass that guides your design decisions.
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So, how do we assess those needs?
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Here's are a few quick methods.
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Method number one: surveys and questionnaires.
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These are great for collecting broad data quickly.
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You can use tools like Google Forms or Microsoft Forms to collect and analyze the data.
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Make sure to ask about skill levels, confidence, challenges, and motivations.
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Method number two: interviews and focus groups.
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With these, you can gain deeper insights into learner attitudes and experiences.
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These work especially well for small or high-stakes projects.
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Method number three: job shadowing and observations.
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If you're working on a corporate or on-the-job training, make sure to spend time watching what learners actually do day-to-day.
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Method number four: pre-assessments.
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Here, you can use quizzes or scenario-based questions to test current knowledge and skills.
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And finally, method number five is stakeholder conversations.
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Make sure to include your SMEs and managers, because they know what success looks like, even if learners can't articulate it themselves.
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Once you've gathered the data, the next step is turning it into something usable for your project.
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Here's where learner personas are so valuable.
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A learner persona is a semi-fictional profile that represents a key segment of your audience.
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Think of it like a character sketch.
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It helps you design for someone, not at someone.
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Here's what a strong learner persona might include A name and photo.
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This is where you give them life, age and background, learning goals, pain points or barriers, preferred learning methods, motivation triggers and technology comfort level.
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So let's take a look at an example so you can imagine what a learner persona might look like.
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Meet Maria.
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She's a 34-year-old healthcare worker going back to school for a certification.
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She's confident in hands-on skills but struggles with online platforms.
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She studies late at night after putting her kids to bed and needs short, mobile-friendly modules.
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She's motivated by progress badges and wants to feel like she's moving forward.
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Knowing Maria exists changes how you design.
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You will likely think differently about pacing, mobile responsiveness and tone.
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This allows you to make design choices that love your learner.
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So you may be wondering how can you create learner personas for your projects?
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Let's take a few minutes to explore some helpful tools that you can use to create effective learner personas using the information I mentioned earlier.
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Links for each of the tools is provided in the show notes.
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Tool number one seven taps.
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This micro learning tool allows you to create laser focused learner personas in 15 minutes flat, which is great.
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You can download a free Canva template from their website that includes some crucial elements for designing microlearning that will wow your learners and your boss too.
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Tool number two Miro.
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Using Miro, you can create a user persona that targets user profiles to better understand them.
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The format is similar to a whiteboard with sticky notes.
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Tool number three the format is similar to a whiteboard with sticky notes.
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Tool number three Lucid.
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Using Lucid, you can create a user persona that contains the person's name, age, location, occupation, income, bio and personality traits.
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The template also allows you to create an empathy map with goals, wants and needs and pain points.
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When you combine needs assessments with learner personas, you build a design strategy that is both data-informed and empathy-driven.
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It's no longer just content delivery, it's human connection.
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That's what designing with love really means.
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Oh, and here's a tip If you're short on time, you don't have to create 10 personas.
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Start with two or three.
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Focus on your primary audience and the outliers who might be hard to understand.
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Make sure to use your personas throughout the design process, refer to them in meetings, during prototype reviews and even when evaluating learning outcomes and evaluating learning outcomes.
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I hope you have found this information about the benefits of assessing learner needs and creating effective learner personas helpful as you design engaging, learner and human-centered designs.
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As a recap, we covered why it is important to assess learner needs, creating learner personas that actually work, and how to bring it all together.
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So here's your challenge for this week Take a look at your current or upcoming project.
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Have you done a learner needs assessment?
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If not, schedule a quick stakeholder chat, send out a mini survey or simply jot down what you think your learners need and go validate it.
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Then try drafting one learner persona using real data you've gathered.
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Make sure to give them a name.
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You can also hang their profile next to your desk as a reminder.
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Design like you're designing for them because you are.
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I would encourage you to view the interactive infographic that I developed, which covers the key information I discussed in the episode, especially if you are new to instructional design.
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I discussed in the episode, especially if you are new to instructional design.
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If you found this episode helpful, please send me a text or leave a comment on the companion blog site.
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You can also share this episode with a fellow instructional designer or educator.
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As I conclude this episode, here's an inspiring quote from the late Steve Jobs Design is not just what it looks like and feels like.
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Design is how it works.
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This quote is a powerful reminder that great instructional design isn't just about aesthetics or content.
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It's about function, and function begins with deeply understanding your learner's needs and designing with them in mind.
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Thank you for taking some time to listen to this podcast episode today.
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Your support means the world to me.
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If you'd like to help keep the podcast going, you can share it with a friend or colleague, leave a heartfelt review or offer a monetary contribution.
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Every act of support, big or small, makes a difference and I'm truly thankful for you.
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