User Personas
Problem
Technology-driven companies teams are often quick to build solutions without always having an understanding of the unique needs of the people they are building for. This can cause us to lose sight of the end-user and lead us to build software solutions that are based on our personal experiences and biases.
Goal
Put users at the center of our product design work for the Navigating Care platform, by creating and integrating user personas into our process. Circulate personas on digital displays throughout the office, and share them in our employee onboarding deck.
Process
Discover our users by researching roles and needs in the oncology clinic setting; lead a design-thinking workshop to share team knowledge; synthesize research from the discovery phase by highlighting key pains and gains; design persona infographics to socialize company-wide to help orient our work to our users' needs and pain points.
Outcome
The product team uses our personas when building user-stories and in scenario conversations, such as "Janet wants to be able to see a list of patients to call back". New employees have expressed that they appreciate seeing this information included in onboarding.
User Discovery
To better understand our users, I researched the clinic ecosystem to learn who was most engaged with our product, as well as opportunities for expanding our solutions to other roles. I created a graph to help make the case for which personas to develop first.
Lead a Workshop
I led a design-thinking session to help uncover the common attitudes and behaviors of each user type. Through this process, our product team was able to quickly share knowledge based on each individual's research and observations.
Synthesize Research
The result was a shared understanding of common user needs and pain points, which provided building blocks for our user personas. I created digitized versions of empathy maps that would become companions to our user personas.
Design Persona Infographics
I designed a branded template to display an overview of each persona. The designs were optimized for digital display to circulate in the office on our large hanging displays. The personas were also used in our employee onboarding experience.
