Personas in online health communities

Abstract

Many researchers and practitioners use online health communities (OHCs) to influence health behavior and provide patients with social support. One of the biggest challenges in this approach, however, is the rate of attrition. OHCs face similar problems as other social media platforms where user migration happens unless tailored content and appropriate socialization is supported. To provide tailored support for each OHC user, we developed personas in OHCs illustrating users' needs and requirements in OHC use. To develop OHC personas, we first interviewed 16 OHC users and administrators to qualitatively understand varying user needs in OHC. Based on their responses, we developed an online survey to systematically investigate OHC personas. We received 184 survey responses from OHC users, which informed their values and their OHC use patterns. We performed open coding analysis with the interview data and cluster analysis with the survey data and consolidated the analyses of the two datasets. Four personas emerged-Caretakers, Opportunists, Scientists, and Adventurers. The results inform users' interaction behavior and attitude patterns with OHCs. We discuss implications for how these personas inform OHCs in delivering personalized informational and emotional support.

Keywords: Consumer health informatics; Online health community; Online health information seeking; Patient support; Persona; Social support.

Figure 1

A screenshot of a prototypical OHC shown to participants as a probe on how they read and post in OHCs.

Figure 2

A screenshot of the affinity diagramming exercise [4] in eliciting emerging usage behavior, patterns and values that led to an initial set of personas. The full diagram is included in the Appendix.

Figure 3

Cluster analysis results with the survey data. The colored circles and persona labels indicate their related questions on each persona’s value, reading, and posting behavior based on the affinity diagramming results (Shown in Figure 2). For instance, Opportunists indicated the group of personas who liked to conduct targeted search on search engines (R_TARGETED_SEARCH) and selectively read the topics they are interested in learning about (R_SELECTIVE_READ), and get answers to their focused questions (V_GET_ANSWERS). They also considered OHCs useful for getting unusual information they would not find elsewhere (R_LOOK_FOR_UNUSUAL_INFO).

Figure 4

Clusters of survey participants based on the four persona scores, (a) participants with high scores in all personas; (b) participants with high scores in Opportunist and Scientist groups and low scores on Adventurer and Caretaker; (c) participants with low scores on Adventurer and Caretaker and no responses towards Opportunist and Scientist question groups; (d) participants with no response to any of the four persona questions; (e) participants with overall low scores to all four personas.