Personas Lisa Gualtieri, PhD, ScM, Course Director Tufts University School of Medicine July 17, 2012 1.

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PersonasLisa Gualtieri, PhD, ScM, Course Director

Tufts University School of MedicineJuly 17, 2012

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Agenda• What are personas and why are they useful?• Example of persona• Best practices for creating personas• Create personas

Competitive analysis

Personas

SWOT

Goals

Technology

Content

Design

Evaluation

New digital strategy

Existing digital strategy

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Ways to learn about users Advantages Disadvantages

Your survey

Using 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 observing real people, focus

groups, etc.• Presented as a vivid, narrative description

of a single “person” who represents a segment

• Used to guide the design of products, messaging, and strategy

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?

Source: http://www.webmd.com/diet/features/savvy-weight-loss-know-thyself

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Are these people personas?

Personas help avoid 2 problems

• Design for everyone• Self-referential design

A product designed to please everyone won’t please anyone.

Source: Wenger (http://www.wenger.ch/)

Source: Wenger (http://www.wenger.ch/)

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.

Source: Critical Mass (http://www.criticalmass.com/)

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

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

consistent 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

• What are personas and why are they useful?

• Example of a persona by Claire Berman

• Best practices for creating personas

• Create personas

Agenda

MGH Benson-Henry Mind Body Institute

• Current– 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 providers• 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: Paul’s evening• At home

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

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

– She urges him to look at the website but he’s reluctant to

– She insists and he goes online• The trigger

Will this help Paul?

Scenario leads to defining Paul’s needs

• Goes online– Still dubious, Paul goes to the site and notices Track

your stress level which he is curious enough to try– He selects I have… heart disease– 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 he decides it’s something he can try because it will make his wife happy and may just work

– Right then he tries some exercises

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What did one persona, Paul, teach us about design?

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Will this help Paul?

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Personas come in many different forms

• What are personas and why are they useful?

• Example of a persona

• What are the best practices for creating personas?

• Create personas

Agenda

Best practices in persona development

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

• List your target user populations– Refine if subgroups have specific needs or

characteristics• Ex: people who want to lose weight might be broken

down by amount of weight to lose

– Consider secondary populations as conduits• Ex: providers or caregivers

• Prioritize based on potential impact• Select the 4 most important ones

• List relevant health status• Include disabilities

• List relevant demographics such as age, gender, or ethnicity

• List the relevant environment such as devices and locations used– Example: Paul was a commuter with an iPhone

Define emotional state: how do you your personas feel?

• Select a target user population from your prioritized list– Develop characteristics representing health

status, demographics, and environment– Give your persona a name and picture– Create a quote that encapsulates the persona

• Check that characteristics are distributed reasonably

• Base your personas on research or validate

3. Create personas

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4. Create scenarios

• Walk through a day in each personas’ life– Initial use

• What are the persona’s needs, expectations, fears, ?• What was the trigger or inciting incident?

– Inciting comes from the Latin word incitare which means “to put into rapid motion, urge, encourage, and stimulate.” It’s an event that catalyzes your hero to “go into motion” and take action

– Repeat use• Was initial experience positive or enticing enough to return?

• Format– Narrative (like Paul)– Timeline or “customer journey”

Focus on emotion

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5. Evaluate your personas

• Does this set of personas seem accurate?• Do they seem realistic?• Do they seem comprehensive?• What else do you need to know?

• Redesign by considering their needs• Design by considering their needs

• What are personas and why are they useful?

• Example of a persona

• What are the best practices for creating personas?

• Create personas using worksheet

Agenda