elsevier nurse personas
Crafting personas that actually help designers and stakeholders make decisions.
the problemnurses are the largest single component of hospital staff (with over 3.1 million registered nurses in the US). yet, nurses keep leaving the profession and there’s a growing need that will continue for at least 20 years.
source elsevier designs and builds several products for nurses, yet we all categorize them under the same persona of “nurse”
the opportunityux and product need a universal tool that defines meaningful differences in such a huge population of users.
the solutionelsevier nurse personas
(And these aren’t your average personas!)
Note: I’m unable to show the final personas on my portfolio. I will walk through highlights of the project and key insights along the way.
-
The Elsevier nurse personas are a set of personas that helped design and product align their goals and roadmaps based on key nursing characteristics from 70 nurse and support staff interviews.
-
UX Manager
This project was a UX-led initiative by me and 2 other UX designers
-
August 2020 - December 2020
the ux process
-
1. conduct research: facilitate 70 1-hour interviews (big population = big numbers)
-
2. synthesize: find patterns around behaviors, not demographics
-
3. deliver: create succinct and impactful personas
1. conduct research: facilitate 70 1-hour interviews
Phase 1 outcomesConduct as many interviews as we could by the end of 2020
With stakeholders, prioritize which types of nurses we would recruit for the study
Try not to get research burnout
key activities
Facilitate 1-hour Zoom interviews with nurses across the US
Recruit (on our own) nurses and keep track of participant recruiting data
Write scripts based on different types of nurses we targeted
Write 1-page summaries after each interview to send to the other UX designers and stakeholders
key finding: the best way to get data is to ask about a nurse’s last shift
It’s easy to fall into the trap of getting generalized data from interviews. “What’s your day typically like?” as an example. We experimented in the first few interviews with questions that would elicit more concrete data. The best question we asked upfront was, “What was your last shift like? Start from how you got to work to how you got back home.” Not only was the data richer, but it also highlighted other factors that influence a nurse, like how some chose jobs to fit in with their family’s schedule.
2. synthesize: find patterns around behaviors, not demographics
phase 2 outcomesCreate personas around behaviors that impact how they interact with Elsevier products as well as decisions they make in their career
Refrain from including any trivial characteristics (ex: What is this nurse’s favorite band?)
key activities
Analyze and synthesize data as we conducted interviews in Miro (we were a completely remote team)
Send out bi-weekly quotes and insights to stakeholders to keep them engaged and excited about the results
key finding: nurses burn out in different ways
Whether it be from a more “boring” position or one that demands a lot of physical and emotional bandwidth, nurses burn out in different ways. Their personal needs and values directly impact how they burn out. If they need to prioritize a strict schedule because their personal life includes young kids, then night shifts and high acuity care settings will burn them out faster. Yet some nurses want more of a challenge, so high acuity settings provide more fulfillment.
key finding: our personas needed “hats”
As part of our framework, we created something called “hats” that personas could wear. These would be additional roles or challenges that a persona may take on. For example, there are nurse mentors called “preceptors” who still have all the core wants and needs of nurses, but have additional responsibilities put on their shoulders. So instead of making an entirely new persona, we decided to create “hats” as a metaphor for how nurses often end up with other responsibilities on top of their core job.
3. deliver: create succinct and impactful personas
Phase 3 outcomesCreate personas that bring purpose and clarity to the team (Note: Many of the stakeholders had been in healthcare tech for years. So we needed to bring a new way of thinking about the nursing population)
Limit each persona to 1 PowerPoint slide so they could be used at every kickoff to align stakeholders quickly
key activities
Diverge and create several-page personas, then edit content down to 1-page personas
Conduct weekly stakeholder sessions to critique and refine personas
Collaborate with a principal visual designer to create easy-to-read and content-rich PowerPoint slides
Key finding: using personas is more important than creating them
We’ve all been there when someone asks, “Do you have personas?” and someone digs up an old file from years past. As a team at Elsevier, we dug into this issue with stakeholders. Why did past personas not get used? What caused them to go untouched? We created success criteria from this project with product management and engineering as our north star: if we could get folks to use these personas at the beginning of every kickoff, then we’d be successful and more likely to update them when they became stale.
the impactyes! we got folks to use personas (and not just designers).
In the first project after unveiling our nurse personas, the Elsevier Clinical Learning team reorganized their product priority, UX roadmap, and presentation template to center around these new personas. That meant that discussions around priorities and needs were easier, and we could quickly identify which types of nurses we needed to recruit for research.