Design teams can utilize Survey2Persona, which is a tool that can turn the survey responses into meaningful personas.
Personas play a significant role in the healthcare sector by providing a human-centered approach to understanding and addressing the needs, preferences, and behaviors of patients, healthcare providers, and other stakeholders. We will demonstrate how personas can be used in the healthcare area, with an example scenario of personas aiding the process of creating a medical device design, specifically an insulin pen.
Scenario: Designing a patient-friendly insulin pen for diabetes patients
Background: Diabetes patients often carry insulin injections that are required to manage their blood sugar levels. However, traditional insulin pens can be hard to use, especially for patients who have limited dexterity. The goal is to design a medical device to create a user-friendly insulin pen that addresses the challenges the patients face.
Persona Design Process:
Step 1- User Research and Persona Creation
In this stage, the design team has to conduct interviews and/surveys with diabetes patients, caregivers, and healthcare providers. During this step, the design team can utilize Survey2Persona, which is a tool that can turn the survey responses into meaningful personas. The team can create personas representing different user profiles, including elderly patients and those with dexterity issues. The personas will help demonstrate different patient groups, and different challenges faced by those groups.
Step 2- Requirements Gathering
Based on the user research done, the design team can compile a list of design requirements from the needs, wants, pain points, etc. presented by the algorthemically-generated personas. Some of these design requirements may include easier grip, clear dosage display, and minimized discomfort.
Once the list of design requirements done, the design team can continue their system development process as usual, where they would do concept generation, prototyping, and user testing.
Step 3- Testing and evaluation using personas
For testing, the team can recruit diabetes patients that are represented by the personas they created earlier. These patients study participants could be asked to perform certain tasks to test the prototype and its effectiveness. Observation as well as feedback can be collected to determine usability issues and improvements.
Afterwards, the team can continue with refinement, and eventually launching the new medical tool, perform training to the health providers, caregivers, and patients.
Conclusion
In this scenario, the medical device design process focuses on creating an insulin pen that prioritizes user needs, usability, and accessibility. Creating personas using survey data in the initial stages creates a representation of the consumers and their needs, and allows the design team to ensure that the final product addresses the challenges faced by patients in managing their diabetes effectively and comfortably.
Want more? Read:
Jansen, B. J., Aldous, K, Salminen, J., Almerekhi, H. and Jung, S.G. (2023). Understanding Audiences, Customers, and Users via Analytics – An Introduction to the Employment of Web, Social, and Other Types of Digital People Data. Springer Nature.
Jansen, B. J., Salminen, J., Jung, S.G., and Guan, K. (2021). Data-Driven Personas. Synthesis Lectures on Human-Centered Informatics,1 Carroll, J. (Ed). Morgan-Claypool: San Rafael, CA., 4:1, i-317.
Salminen, J. O., Nielsen, L., Bahloul, M., Jørgensen, R.G., Santos, J. M., Jung, S.G., and Jansen, B. J. (2022). Persona Preparedness: A Survey Instrument for Measuring the Organizational Readiness for Deploying Personas. Information Technology and Management.
