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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