  Scaling and sustaining educational innovations is a common problem in the
learning sciences. Professional development resources around educational
innovations that are personalized to appeal to the needs and motivations of
different types of faculty offer a possible solution. The method of developing
personas to represent key types of users is commonly employed in user-interface
design and can be used to produce personalized resources. Personas are
fictional named archetypes of users encompassing generalizations of their key
characteristics and goals that emerge from interviews. This method is
especially powerful because personas succinctly package information into the
form of a person, who is easily understood and reasoned about. Herein we
describe the creation of a set of personas focusing on the needs and
motivations of physics faculty around assessment and teaching. We present the
personas, a discussion of how they inform our design and how the method can be
used more broadly.
