Personas for Policy-Making and Healthcare Design

Abstract

Personas are widely used in design, and have recently spread to other fields such as policy-making and healthcare, where they help to convey the complexities of an ageing population. Policies and healthcare systems should rely on quantitative data to ensure the best impact on society, but no database exists that represents the aging population in a holistic and deep way, making it difficult to create effective personas. In this paper, we review the available surveys on the effects of aging, and propose three approaches that use these surveys to create better quantitative personas.

Tangible futures: Combining scenario thinking and personas - A pilot study on urban mobility

“…between designers and clients (Grudin & Pruitt, 2002;Pruitt & Grudin, 2003). Personas are increasingly used in policy making to help imagining more human-centered policies and services to the population (Gonzalez de Heredia et al, 2018). De Moor, Saritas, Schuurman, Claeys, and De Marez (2014) demonstrate the use of personas combined with cultural probing for investigating the future of TV experiences.…”

“…To avoid these methodological weaknesses, it is possible to develop personas using a Delphi process (Schmidt, 1997), involving domain experts to gain consensus on the definition of archetypal users (Brancheau & Wetherbe, 1987;Miaskiewicz & Kozar, 2011). Using a different approach, Gonzalez de Heredia et al (2018) presented three structured methods for developing personas closer to empirical data: collecting new survey data; clustering existing data from multiple surveys; iterating between interviews with a small sample of people linked with survey data. Stevenson and Mattson (2019) recently proposed to increase the accuracy of personas by creating a computational persona generator, based on aggregated national survey data and individual micro-data.…”

“…The generation of relevant representative personas could be inspired by quantitative methods based on surveys, or mixed methods based on interviews and surveys, as e.g. by Gonzalez de Heredia et al (2018) or Stevenson and Mattson (2019). Furthermore, the pilot study did not include the development or discussion of scenarios in the group, which could be a limit to the co-creation approach.…”

Co-creating Persona Scenarios with Diverse Users Enriching Inclusive Design

“…Personas are increasingly used in the design of digital health services as well [10,11]. Personas and scenarios are proposed as communication tools for multidisciplinary teams developing medical devices [12].…”

“…While some researchers do not recommend reusing personas, others may think that providing research-based personas to designers that do not have access to users with disabilities can be helpful. Others have created a set of personas that match a wide range of European Older Adults skills and disabilities based on demographic data [11,19]. Gonzalez de Heredia et al [11] propose quantitative measures to design personas for healthcare development and policy-making, based on several surveys of the aging population.…”