Hey, Megan, let's do a podcast.

Great idea. What should we talk about?

In our last episode, Megan, we talked about learner Personas. I know empathy mapping is also a really great way to start to get into the mind or the mindset of your learner population. So I was hoping we could talk a little bit about that. Is there a difference between the two?

Yes and no. On one level? No. Both of them are really, really useful tools for connecting in with your audience, whether they're learners or users or however you're connecting in. Right. Whatever you're creating. Most of the time, you could pick an empathy map or a learner Persona, and you can't go wrong because whatever that is is better than what folks used to be doing without those. Right. Because either you're doing that either no audience connection at all, or you're doing averages or ranges or something, and you don't have anything meaningful.

So either way, they're a huge improvement. They each get to something a little bit different. They have a slightly different purpose and different histories. And so I could see choosing one over the other.

So what is the difference?

I think I was about to say we could have a whole podcast about.

That, but apparently that's what we're doing.

All right, so I see that Personas, whether I'm using them for learner Personas or user Personas, if I'm building software or buyer Personas, I'm doing sales or marketing, they tend to be about the person themselves, and they tend to. I'm making air quotes. Have a focus on that individual, their experiences, how they come into this, some of their demographics, some of their outside needs and their goals. Empathy maps tend to focus on that person's perspective of the world around them. How do they. What do they see? What are they hearing from other people? How do they perceive their gains and pains? Right. Their benefits and their struggles. And so I think the directionality is different.

But there's also a gigantic Venn diagram between the two. Right. And I think you have to be really, really parsing things in order to need to focus on where those differences are. I love this. So it explains Dave Gray, who wrote gamestorming, which was, gosh, like a formative book for me, eons ago, decades ago, maybe. But he said about this in a blog post that we'll post in the show, notes this particular tool, and he's talking about empathy maps that they created. This particular tool helped teams develop deep shared understanding and empathy for other people. People use it to help them improve customer service, to navigate organizational Politics to design better work environments, and a host of other things.

I use the empathy maps, actually, if I can't figure out why somebody's being like, acting in a really weird way, I will use. I'll make an empathy map of them to see, like, how are they seeing the world and how. How might that influence their behavior? Because very few of us, like, wake up in the morning deciding I'm going to be a jerk to somebody or I'm going to be utterly irrational today. And I mean some days. But people are usually operating within a worldview that makes sense to them. So I find that empathy map helps figure out what that worldview might be.

If you have these two tools to pick between, how do you choose which one to use?

My Go to is going to be a learner Persona. It's part of what we've done in our LLAMA project, Agile for Instructional Designers. It's part of. It's just what I know best. But I recommend to people, if you're in an organization that already uses either user Personas or empathy maps, use whatever everybody else around you already uses. You don't have to explain it, you don't have to defend it, you don't have to sell it. You just use it and go with it. And then your stuff and your work becomes that much more interoperable with all the work that people are going around with you.

Right. It's just less effort. Unless. Unless that's not working for you or you want to mix something up intentionally. So I could see both ways, right? Go with the flow or purposely disrupt the flow for a particular purpose. Generally, product design is an empathy map kind of thing and product or service design. And we use learning design or learning experience design. We use Personas, software design.

We tend to use Personas. But I could go either way.

Are there templates that we could use for either one of these two Personas or empathy Maps?

Yes, yes. So you can just Google explain Empathy Map and get all sorts of different iterations and versions and they've tweaked them over time. There's a Dave Gray blog post releasing kind of a new version of the empathy map in 2017. I actually learned the older version of Empathy Mapping in some of my early design thinking work. So you also see, you'll see empathy maps and design thinking.

And that's X plane, spelled X with.

No E, P, L, A N E, like an airplane. Which is actually a company that tier one performance bought a few years back, which is such a nice compliment to their whole suite of companies, but yeah, so you can Google that. And then we have a Learner Persona template that we can include with this episode, which is actually different than the Learner Persona template that we have in Agile for instructional designers. So we've actually even iterated on ours. We brought a different some of the work that we were doing with Jess Jackson around racial equity and inclusion in our work and system, systemic bias. We actually brought in some ways of looking at access to learning and barriers to performance in the workplace that the newer version of our Persona template includes.

Okay, yeah, I got it. This makes a whole lot of sense because learning engineering, it's inherently a human centered design process. And when we think about all the tools that we have available to us, when we're taking a learning engineering approach to our projects, we have a whole assortment that we can choose from. And Empathy Maps and Learner Personas are just two of those tools that we can pull from.

Totally. So how'd that go, Meg?

That was great. It really helped me to better understand the difference between Empathy Maps and Learner Personas. I think, you know, the two could get a little fuzzy in my head as to, like, when would you use one or the other? And that was really helpful.

Cool. Yeah, sometimes I could get a little too cavalier about, oh, you could use whichever one and they each have separate places. But I think you can't go wrong with any one of them.

Yep. This is Meg Fairchild and Megan Torrence, and this has been a podcast from Torrence Learning. Tangents is the official podcast of Torrents Learning, as though we have an unofficial one. Tangents is hosted by Meg Fairchild and Megan Torrence. It's produced by Dean Castile and Meg Fairchild, engineered and edited by Dean Castile, with original music also by Dean Castile. This episode was fact checked by Meg Fairchild.