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Digital Strategies for Health Communication

Personas

Lisa Gualtieri, PhD, ScM, Course DirectorTufts University School of Medicine

July 16, 2013

• How can you learn about your target users?• What are personas and why are they useful for

design and as a team-building activity?• Examples of personas and scenarios• Best practices for creating personas• Create 4 personas using worksheet

Agenda

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Ways to learn about users Advantages Disadvantages

Your survey

Using Pew and other surveys

Focus groups

Interviews and participatory design

Observation and ethnographic research

Social media, ratings, and reviews

User feedback through email or feedback forms

Personas

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Personas defined

• A model of key user attributes and goals• Distilled from surveys, observing real

people, focus groups, etc.• Presented as a vivid, narrative description of

a single “person” • Used to guide all aspects of design

Are these TV Personalities personas?• The Snob: “the most finicky of viewers”• The Know-It-All: an intellectual TV addict• The Escapist: loves the simple, funny shows• On-The-Go Viewer: only watches shows on

laptop/tablet• The Minimalist: not a TV fan, but stays in the loop with

reviews/synopses

http://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/television/2012/06/02/how-handle-much-sunday-night/Ym4aKctla1ojMl3DYPDEgN/story.html?s_campaign=sm_tw

• The Support Seeker: “turns to friends and pros for answers”

• The Serial Snacker: prefers snacking to meals, eating is a habit rather than a need

• The Free Spirit: plays by own rules, resistant to rigid weight loss programs

• The Sweet Tooth: cannot live without sweets • The Distracted Diner: a busy

multi-tasker, unaware of food intake

Are these Diet Personalities personas?

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Are these people personas?

Personas avoid

• Design for everyone

• Design for oneself

You are not the user . . . Lisa is the user

We’ve got to push the brand

more.

It would be so much cooler if it

had videos.

It needs to be “green” with lots of rural imagery.

I would want an advanced

configuration tool.

Our competitor has blogs.

Team-building activity

Personas help your team• Personas provide your entire team with an

understanding of your target users and their relevant characteristics

Understand

• Personas provide a human-face to focus empathy on the real people represented by your personas

Empathize

• Personas help to design for appeal, usability, and effectivenessIdeate

• Personas allow designers to prioritize features and evaluate proposed solutions by how well personas’ needs will be met

Prioritize

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Obstacles to persona use – even more likely when “outsourced”

Persona example adapted from Claire Berman

• Current users of MGH BHMBI– General public, patients, providers

• Desired– Patients with chronic disease or stress who seek

information about complimentary and alternative medicine (CAM) on their own

– People referred by their medical or insurance providers

– People whose companies offer employee wellness programs

Goal: expand reach

Meet Paul• Demographics

– Paul is a 35 year-old Caucasian male living in Newton, MA– He is married with no children– He has a college education– He works as a Financial Planner in Boston and commutes for an hour

each day using public transportation• Technology

– Paul has an iPhone and a laptop. He is online all the time!• Health

– Paul feels that his health is good overall, but he has had a few anxiety attacks recently due to the high level of stress in his job

– He has a family history of heart attacks– He is worried about these recent anxiety attacks and that he is at risk for

having a heart attack himself

Scenario: Paul’s morning

• Early morning– Paul wakes up at 5:30, goes for run, comes home

and showers– He eats a quick breakfast of cereal and coffee with

his wife and they both leave for work• Commute to work

– He starts to feel anxious as soon as he gets onto the bus and thinks about work

– He checks email and financial news on his iPhone

Scenario: Paul’s day

• Work– Paul spends 10 hours at work with quick lunch break

• Commute home– On the bus, Paul starts feeling overwhelmed with

work pressures– His breathing becomes rapid and he feels like he

can’t get enough air; it passes after 10 minutes but it is not the first anxiety attack he’s had

– Paul doesn’t want to end up having a heart attack at a young age like his father and grandfather did

Scenario: the trigger• At home

– When Paul gets home, his wife is reading a magazine from their health insurance company

– An article about stress mentions the MGH Benson-Henry Mind Body Institute website

– Paul tells her about his anxiety attack on the commute home

– She insists he look at the website

Will this help Paul?

Scenario leads to redesign• Goes online

– Still dubious, Paul goes to the site and notices Track your stress level which he tries

– He downloads a few instructional videos onto his iPhone and plans to watch them the next day on his commute into work

• Next day – He watches the videos, making sure no one else on

the bus can see, and tries some exercises– He decides it’s something he can do for a week

because it will make his wife happy and may work

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Will this help Paul?

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Personas production value varies

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Timeline or “customer journey”: value especially with mobile devices

Focus on emotion

Define emotional state: how do you your personas feel?

Best practices in persona development

• Segment your users1• Define characteristics2• Create 4 personas3• Create scenarios with triggers4• Evaluate your personas5• Learn from them6

Persona video and worksheet