Personas are one technique to make the process of user/patient engagement in co-design easier. In a way, they provide a framework and language to solicit input from a group of people. For example, think of an activity for an advisory group consultation in which people think about different scenarios encountered by the persona.
Personas elevate the user in co-design
Personas can sometimes generate empathy, and people may be prompted to share their own experiences and stories if they relate to a persona. Participants also report experiencing pride and design co-ownership when they construct personas they can relate to.
Personas can also be a safer way of capturing people’s experiences and stories since personas can aggregate multiple aspects of identities and can be anonymized.
Personas can provide a common language to discuss design considerations with various interest holders
Personas can be a proxy for patient perspectives, especially when participant recruitment is challenging, or if people might not be able to participate in the entire design process due to ill health or other barriers.
Personas create an opportunity to evaluate design effectiveness
A last point to mention is that personas can be consulted multiple times throughout the design process, and preliminary checks can be done to see if the design meets the needs of the persona. In this way, personas are also a useful method to report on how a particular product or service addresses barriers for certain groups.
Personas create an opportunity to adopt an intersectional lens
From an EDI lens, personas help us to focus on considering the ‘whole person’—and this is what we mean by ‘adopting an intersectional lens.’ We’re not singling out one specific element of a person’s identity, but looking at the various intersecting aspects of their identity at the same time (see sub-node for more information).