Jobke Wentzel*, University of twente, enschede, Netherlands Lisette Van Gemert-Pijnen, university of Twente, enschede, Netherlands Track: Practice Presentation Topic: Persuasive communication and technology Presentation Type: Poster presentation Submission Type: Single Presentation Last modified: 2012-09-11

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Backgrounds
Many Health technology projects do not live up to their expectations, as the final technology fails to meet both the clients’ needs and wishes, as well as the demands placed on the technology by health professionals and other stakeholders (insurers, providers) and the social environment in which technology needs to be implemented. Applying a design process geared towards incorporating these demands from patients and professionals is an approach that maximizes chances of success. Persuasive designs, developed via the CeHRes roadmap (Van Gemert, 2011), incorporate both a human-centered design as well as a business modeling focus.
Objectives
One of the crucial ingredients of this design process can be the use of personas: biographies of fictitious persons, typical for a group of people, who will, potentially, use a technology. Personas can function as summarizations of primary user groups, can inspire design and can engage the design team. Moreover, they can be a solid basis for creating persuasive design, as they can highlight the primary users’ attitudes and susceptibility towards persuasion. The use of personas is not new, as the idea originates from the 80’s, but their use as a linking pin in a persuasive design approach for creating value-adding and sustainable health technology is innovative.
In this presentation, we will discuss the benefits of personas for persuasive designs, based on empirical research in the field of ePublic Health (infection control). But we will also go a step further. We will provide hands-on information on how developers or designers can create personas and how they can reap the benefits from their efforts.
Methods
Based on empirical research, we demonstrate how risk analysis and intended user identification can identify primary users. Subsequently, the audience will be guided through the process of creating an interview schema for interviewing these primary users and the translation of interview data into persona biographies. Finally, we will show how personas can be used as input for design and as an elicitation method for generating design input from organizational stakeholders.
The case that we will use for the demonstration of creating and utilizing personas will be a mobile app against tick bites and Lyme disease (ePublic health). This app has the purpose of informing the general public about the risk of tick bites, how to deal with ticks and tick bites, and when to visit a GP in case of a tick bite. As such, the app has both an informative, as well as a persuasive purpose, as it also needs to convince the user to check for tick bites after having visited a high-endemic area.
Conclusion
In short, our presentation will enable designers and developers to decide on when to make use of personas in order to reap their benefits, and will show them in more detail how the creation of personas takes place in order to create value-adding, sustainable and persuasive eHealth applications.