Milestone 3 | MyMedicalJournal

MyMedicalJournal: Milestone 3

In the third Milestone for MyMedicalJournal, we created personas for our project.

Step 1

Our first step to creating the personas for our project involved reviewing our second milestone where we created an affinity diagram from our contextual inquiries. We looked at our labels as a starting point and the clusters for details. From there, we identified interview subjects by role.

Identified roles:

Person who takes the role of a caretaker for a family member
Person who has many appointments and/or prescriptions to keep track of
Person who is young, healthy, and does not feel the need to track appointments and prescriptions

Step 2

We then categorized observed behaviors that were exhibited in our affinity diagrams to identify behavioral variables and their ranges which include activities, motivations, aptitudes, and attitudes.

Behavioral variables:

No preventative care → preventative medical visits only → frequent medical visits
Not proactive → proactive
Disorganized → organized
Non-digital → digital

Step 3

Next, we mapped our interview subjects against each of the behavioral variable range and noted how they compare to each other. Combining the identified roles and behavioral variables, we came up with three significant behavioral patterns that formed the framework of each persona.

Behavior Pattern 1:

Goes to all preventative care appointments every year, places importance on keeping track of vitals to remain healthy, remembers to schedule appointments months in advance, is very tech-savvy, keeps track of health records, and uses smartphone apps like reminders and calendar to stay informed about their own health.

Behavior Pattern 2:

Goes to most preventative care appointments and additional appointments when necessary, needs to remember to take and refill prescriptions, knows how to operate a smartphone, and mostly relies on non-digital means of organizing health records, like planners.

Behavior Pattern 3:

Only goes to medical appointments when they have an issue, stashes documents from doctors in purses/wallets and often loses track of them, uses a smartphone for everything, and has an “I’ll remember it” mentality.

When coming up with the content of our personas, we decided on a short bio section, end goals, experience goals, life goals, behavior range scales, and pain points. These sections all contain behavioral variable information derived from our process above. The three goals, which correspond to Don Norman’s three-level theory of cognitive processing, with results based on inferences from our qualitative data, provide context for the motivation of our personas’ behaviors. End goals will inform us of the user’s motivation for performing related tasks, experience goals will inform user experience features of our final design, and life goals will help us design our product as a relationship with the user.

We found it best to visualize proactiveness, tech-savviness, and organizational behavior on a scale and have context of medical appointments, forgetfulness, and preferences of productivity tools narrated in the bio or pain points section. Pain points were important for us to include because this helps us to understand the different needs of our personas, which will serve as a reference when designing the product.

After synthesizing characteristics and defining goals of four users, we checked for redundancy and designated persona types. First, we designated a primary persona, who will be the priority user for our application. Then, we designated secondary personas, and the anti persona was made clear. The final persona narratives were expanded to create the personas below.

Primary Persona

Secondary Personas

Anti Persona

Lessons learned

This process to help create our personas gave us these takeaways:

It kept our personified users focused on and derived from research and qualitative data
It helped us clarify unmet user needs
It reinforced our product’s focus