Personas: The Foundation of a Great User Experience

Today's consumers are demanding more from companies. Customers expect products, services, and information that are timely and catered to their specific needs and desires. Traditionally, companies develop and market products based on market segmentation and demographics, assuming that the features, functionality and messaging will meet the needs of all of the customers in that demographic—a "one size fits all" mentality. However, as the marketplace shifts from a mass manufacturing to a mass customization model, customers needs and desires are more accurately identified through the development of personas rather than through demographic data. "What Is a Persona? A persona represents a cluster of users who exhibit similar behavioral patterns in their purchasing decisions, use of technology or products, customer service preferences, lifestyle choices, and the like. How Are Personas Built? Analysis is then conducted on the research data over the course of one to two weeks.

Using proto-personas to benchmark your team’s understanding Whether you’re starting a project or are in the middle of one have you ever thought to yourself “who are we designing this for again”? Sometimes we can get lost in the day-to-day cycle of project delivery but for a project to be a success, we must make sure our decisions are based on the needs of the user. So what do you do when you’re unsure who your users are or you don’t have the time or budget for an extensive discovery to gather data to identify your target audience? At Valtech, we use the proto-persona workshop to help define what the business currently knows about its users while also allowing us to gain an understanding of the client, the project and the needs of the users. Creating proto-personas is a great way to get buy-in from senior stakeholders and benchmark a company’s current understanding of its users without the initial need to conduct user research. But what is a persona? How can you hold this workshop tomorrow? Here’s a list of the things you’ll need to be successful. 1.

Persona Library | EHR Association Compiled by EHR Association members and stakeholders An important first step in the process of designing usable, safe and effective products is to develop a deep understanding of the users. This information can effectively be documented in the form of a persona, which is a representation of a real user based on qualitative and quantitative research and first-person experience. Personas enable clear understanding of the different users of a product and their goals, problems and backgrounds. All of this information is useful for making future decisions and tradeoffs, defining the styling and vocabulary used, and bringing a user’s perspective to all aspects of design. The personas in this library were built through a collaboration of EHRA members, industry groups, clinicians and others who have in-depth knowledge related to the development and use of health information and technology. We welcome recommendations of additional personas as we grow the EHRA Persona Library.