Background

As Hometeam pivoted from its NYC-based home care agency model to a third-party solution, we realized we had a dearth of knowledge about our new users. Some caregivers might work for agencies, but an increasing number would be Personal Care Assistants (PCAs) directly hired by patients and often related to them.

I traveled to Massachusetts to facilitate generative group discussions with PCAs in English and collaborated with an operations colleague who facilitated the discussions in Spanish (60% of our users are Spanish-speaking).

Excerpt of Questions from Discussion Guide:

• What made you decide to get into caregiving?

• What does a typical day with your patient look like for you?

• What are some of your biggest stressors as a PCA?

• Have you ever noticed something unusual or concerning in your patient's health while caring for them? What did you do? Why?

• Do you feel valued in your work?

Synthesis

After the sessions, I brought stakeholders to the table to collaboratively synthesize our insights into composite personas. These research-based personas allow us to check our assumptions and provide a shared understanding about the people using our products and programs.

Personas

• First-person narrative

• Picture to humanize them

• Goals, motivations, challenges, and blockers

• Behavioral sliding scales (i.e. from task-oriented to observation-oriented)

Modifiers

• Smaller cards represent unpredictable contextual or behavioral factors

• Can add to any persona for increased specificity

Using Personas to Write Scenarios

Personas are a great deliverable, but how do you actually use them? To both utilize and socialize our personas within the company, I facilitated a scenario writing workshop with executives and operations stakeholders.

Scenarios are a storytelling framework for using personas to guide product definition. I instructed participants to write a current scenario by taking a persona card and writing a situational story that included the challenges their persona faces. Then I instructed them to write a future scenario by considering how their persona would interact with a future state of our program/product that addresses those challenges. We used these future scenarios to create a list of potential solutions.

Using Personas to Create Journey Maps

Recently, I created journey maps for two of these personas. These artifacts help us understand where the persona is in the current experience so that we can deliver solutions that occur in response to complement or improve it. My teammates have found these useful as well, so I created a large hand-drawn version on an office wall for everyone to post opportunities!