Persona Development

Personas are only as useful as the research behind them. This project created user personas for the main visitor types coming to hopkinsmedicine.org — grounded in a full year of survey data across mobile and desktop, and structured to reflect not just who users are but what they are doing, where they are doing it, and what they are trying to accomplish.

The Problem A site serving as many audiences as hopkinsmedicine.org — patients, caregivers, physicians, medical students, researchers, job seekers — needed a defined set of user profiles to focus design decisions. Without them, every project risked designing for everyone and succeeding for no one.

Research Goals Determine the primary market segments visiting the site. Build user, task, and environmental profiles for each segment. Integrate those profiles into fictitious but realistic personas that could be used across projects to keep design decisions grounded in real user behavior.

Approach One year of site survey data from both mobile and desktop was reviewed to identify user groups, their primary tasks, their expectations, and their environmental context — including device, location, lighting, and sound conditions. Each persona integrated all four profile types to create a complete picture of a real type of person using the site for a real reason.

Personas were built to focus on probabilities, not possibilities — meaning they reflect what most users in a segment actually do, not everything any user might do. They were designed to be updated as more data became available, with the expectation that high-volume segments like health information seekers would eventually be broken into sub-personas.

Outcome Three to four personas were created representing the primary visitor segments. Each persona is specific enough to be psychologically plausible and practical enough to be used as a design tool — helping teams stay focused on user needs rather than developer preferences or stakeholder assumptions.