personas that cultivate empathy, instead of bias

Read more about this work in The Conduit Blog

My Role

Research Manager / Principal Researcher

The Challenge

Highmark is a leading health insurance organization that provides coverage for millions of customers across the US. In 2022, they launched a partnership with OnDuo, a new personalized care management platform for customers with type 2 diabetes. When the platform was struggling with low adoption and retention, the leadership team turned to research but they were missing a clear picture of their customer's challenges and needs. This is where the idea for the next generation of personas emerged.

IMPACT HIGHLIGHTS

My Approach

Collect and analyze existing research to understand the problem space and the shared knowledge…

  • My team went on an info-gathering expedition and collaborated with cross-functional teams and subject matter experts across the business to build a library of what we know about users/customers with type 2 diabetes

  • We built a shared Miro board where the whole team could explore the research and connect the dots together

  • Using this information, we hosted empathy-building workshops to help the team build a connection with the people they were creating

Brainstorming in Miro with UXR, Caylie O’neil

Interview real people managing type 2 diabetes to ground our research in the lived experiences of our users…

  • We recruited for this niche group through User Interviews and required participants to fill out a pre-interview survey so we could customize each conversation and get the most out of this valuable time

  • We conducted 1:1 remote interviews, centering the conversations around our knowledge gaps, their biggest pain points, and what they envision as the best care management experience/product

Collaboratively brainstorm with product and health insurance experts to identify what a decision-focused, human-centered persona needs to be…

  • We combined the best of what we learned with what we know to be true and found opportunities to meet the most consistent challenges of our customers

  • We designed a spectrum instead of a fixed identity, which allows customers to flow in and out of personas depending on where they are at in their care journey

THE OUTCOME

We intentionally grounded these personas in past research to show our clients the power of their existing data combined with the superstrength of UX thinking. We worked with designers to create visually interesting personas that people enjoy looking at and in doing so, avoided using generic (and often biased) stock photography representing fake users. Instead of this being a one-time static output, this is now a dynamic persona framework/system that can grow and evolve over time.

Our client was so happy with the result of this work, they asked us to map the personas to their existing customer care journeys. They also asked us to expand our scope to a new market segment, customers managing 2 or more chronic conditions.