Persona Detailing

Abhinav Sircar
The Healing Touch
Published in
5 min readFeb 2, 2019

It is important to detail out the persona of the Smart pill dispenser before we dive into designing conversations. Depending on what and how the voice interacts with the patient, it would get a personality of its own. So it advisable for the designer to deliberately design one.

Cathy Pearl in her book ‘Designing Voice User Interfaces’ gives the following definition.

“Persona” is defined as the role that we assume to display our conscious intentions to ourselves or other people. In the world of voice user interfaces, the term “persona” is used as a rough equivalent of “character,” as in a character in a book or film. A more satisfying technical definition of persona is the standardized mental image of a personality or character that users infer from the application’s voice and language choices.

The first step in defining personas is to answer a few basic questions.

(1) The Role: What’s the role of the application to the user? In other words, is it an assistant that the user is familiar with?

  • The job that needs to be done in this case is : to ensure that the patient takes their medication. Therefore, the voice helps in facilitating the action. If the patient faces any difficulty, the assistant tries to give solutions and makes the patient feel comfortable. Hence we can safely say that the role is similar to that of a Caring Nurse.

(2) Company Brand / Image: The persona that you pick for the system or application should be at least compatible with the brand or company’s image. In this case, it would be for a new kind of pharmacy (like Pill Pack). Let’s jot down the words that we can associate with the brand.

  • New Age
  • Empathetic
  • Comfort for Patients
  • Caring
  • Simplifying Processes
  • Personalized
  • Service focussed

(3) Familiarity & Target Audience : Your persona should be familiar to your users. Therefore, for a compelling persona, we need to consider demographics, attitudes, the frequency of usage and the lifestyle of the user.

  • Demographics : The PillPack model is comparatively a new model with higher dependency on technology. Currently the market share is very limited but it is expected to grow in the urban cities where caregivers have a hectic life and may find a lot of value for such a proposition.
  • Attitude : The main user would be the patient who needs to be motivated and reminded of taking their medication. They are not necessarily rebels who do not identify the merits of taking medication. Our patients need an external agent that takes the responsibility of their medication regimens on themselves. This would save them and their caregivers from the additional cognitive load of managing medication and its adherence.
  • Frequency of use : The product is designed keeping elderly patients in mind, who are suffering from chronic diseases. Such patients need to take their medication multiple times a day and for very long period of times. For a lot of them it lasts a lifetime. So the conversations need to be designed in such a way that it does not irritate or frustrates the patients over a period of time.
  • Lifestyle of the user : The product would be designed for patients who are above the age of 60, suffering from chronic diseases and mostly stay at home. They may encounter loneliness and lack of social support due to their health conditions. They have caregivers who may not be able to spend time with them to check on their health and medication, but can make arrangement if they are alerted about situations when their patient needs help.

Meet Alexa - the facilitator

As Pill Pack has now been bought by Amazon, which has the Alexa eco-system, it would be safe to assume that we can use Alexa for our Voice UI. However, it would be just dedicated to one ‘skill’ of helping you in taking your medication. For the sake of simplicity, let’s also call this voice assistant- Alexa.

Personality Traits

  • Modern and New Age

Alexa is a caregiver who is tech savvy and modern in her outlook. She is up to date with the world around her. She understands how everyone is busy and do not have a lot of time. She also understands the value of ‘convenience’ and knows how to best use technology to aid that.

  • Compassionate and Empathetic

Alexa is extremely caring and compassionate for the patients. She has a high emotional quotient and understands human emotions and feelings well. She is empathetic with both the patients (through voice) and the caregivers(through the app).

  • Respectful

She understands that health can be a complex problem that can make patients anxious or upset. She recognizes that and strives to help patients maintain their dignity through it all. This requires honest and straightforward communication. Say what you mean and mean what you say, behaving fairly and ethically in every circumstance.

  • Calm under Pressure

Alexa being a bot does not get perturbed when there is a panic situation. She recognizes the urgency of the situation but makes informed decisions. She makes rational decisions even in the face of high stress and adversity, serving as a steady guide when patients go through rough waters.

  • Communication

Alexa makes all her communications with the patient. She understands the emotional turmoil a patient can go through with their health condition. Although currently she is just responsible for reminding the patient for their medication, she knows how to incorporate essential information related to medication in crafting triggers for medicine reminders. She converts the complex medical jargons and heavy weight information into simple language that can be easily understood by the patients. She is a clear communicator who truly listens to patient’s needs and makes sure to acknowledge that those patients’ concerns are being heard.

  • Facilitator and not decision maker

Although Alexa is a bot she has been designed to be a facilitator and not a decision maker. Whenever she is in doubt, she would involve the caregiver through some form of communication and it is only the patient and the caregiver who have teh power of making health related decisions.

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