SHAPES Personas

SHAPES Personas aim to contribute to a better understanding of the user needs for SHAPES. Basic personas with their attributes, attitudes, behaviours and characteristics are considered to be evidence-based knowledge bases that provide models of users of future SHAPES digital solutions and innovations.

Persona, known also as “user persona”, is a detailed description of a fictional person (often a composite of real individuals) used to communicate the key motivations, concerns, and interests of a user group (Bhattacharyya et al., 2019). Personas include fictitious characters described in narrative form in order to help solve design questions.

Personas enable designers to better focus on primary users, especially on their behavioural patterns and user needs (Huh et al., 2016) and are widely used in system design organizations as a complement to individual or other user data. They provide a basic prototype of persons/users for the interaction of an individual with a product/digital solution.

Inspired by the Blueprint personas, the creation of personas in the SHAPES project was a combination of literature study and qualitative methods while making use of the rich experience with the target population of older adults within the UP and NUIM teams. We consulted the creative process with the partners from our WP on this stage of the project.

Bhattacharyya, O., Mossman, K., Gustafsson, L., & Schneider, E. C. (2019). Using human-centered design to build a digital health advisor for patients with complex needs: Persona and prototype development. Journal of Medical Internet Research, 21(5), e10318. https://doi.org/10.2196/10318

Huh, J., Kwon, B., Kim, S., Lee, S., Choo, J., Kim, J., & Yi, J. (2016). Personas in online health communities. Journal of Biomedical Informatics, 63, 212-225. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbi.2016.08.019