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User personas are crucial tools for understanding target audiences effectively. This article provides a guide on creating user personas. It emphasizes the importance of research, including gathering demographic data and behavioral patterns. It discusses the significance of empathy in persona creation, encouraging designers to step into the shoes of their users. By following these guidelines, you can develop accurate, insightful user personas that enhance your work moving forward.  

This blog style resource outlines the benefits of successful institutional change, 5 strategies to go about successful institutional change, and 3 models outlining theories to approach change and institutional innovation.

This resource can be used as a guide for organization of an empathy interview with information on what an empathy interview is, why to conduct one, how to conduct one, sample questions, and next steps after the interviews.

This resource outlines what design thinking is, how it works, a step by step guide to what it looks like in action, and how it can benefit reimagining of student employment with helpful links to additional resources.

Design thinking, a human-centered approach to problem-solving, can help program designers understand the unique challenges and opportunities faced by student employees.  By empathizing with students, defining the problem, ideating potential solutions, prototyping ideas, and testing them with students and student employee supervisors, program designers can create a program that is innovative, effective, and sustainable. The following resource details a number of idea generation activities that can be leveraged as part of the design thinking process.

Slide deck used when new units (supervisors, leadership, etc.) are interested in hearing more about Work+.