Surgical Robotic Persona Development
Project Overview
We set out to develop a series of personas describing the attitudes, behaviors, and beliefs of users of a robotically assisted navigational platform in order to drive engagement and instill a user-centered approach to product development.
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The project commenced with a kickoff workshop and a series of internal stakeholder interviews. Through these touchpoints, we sought to better understand the client’s learning objectives, expectations for the persona profiles, and how they were currently thinking about the various user groups interacting with their products.
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We then engaged in user research, where I designed a study that would tease out the demographic, behavioral, and attitudinal factors needed to build persona profiles. Great consideration was made to include not only the primary users but also the support staff as they play a major role in supporting procedures.
Virtual in-depth interviews were chosen as going on-site during the pandemic was not possible and a remote approach would allow us to engage with stakeholders from across the country.
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Following our interviews, we engaged in language analysis to tease out our key learnings from each user, building profiles for everyone we spoke with. We then undertook the process of identifying themes amongst our users and blended what we learned into a series of persona profiles.
Throughout this process, I regularly presented progress to the client team ensuring we were painting a full and complete picture of each care provider as it related to the procedure and the use of robotics.
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Finally, we brought the persona profiles to life, crafting a clear and concise narrative for each of the four personas adding rich imagery and easily digestable infographics to make the content relatable to a broad client audience.
With an eye towards activation, we delivered the personas as an easily accessible slide presentation as well as full-size cutouts for display in the client’s corporate headquarters. The project concluded with the delivery of the persona profiles, where I led an extended client team through our findings and what differentiates each of the profiles.
Client: A Leading Manufacturer of Surgical Robotic Equipment
Time: 2021, 3 Months
Role: Project Lead, Principal Investigator
Key Takeaways
User research helped us see a more effective segmentation model
Going into this research, the client team directed us to build out personas related to provider roles (i.e., Thoracic Surgeon, Respiratory Therapist, etc.) as they saw these as natural differentiators of the user groups under investigation.
What we ended up finding through our interviews with these user groups is that factors like hospital size and years in practice were equally, if not more important in shaping attitudes and behaviors related to robotics usage.
This helped us reframe the segmentation categories and deliver personas that better aligned to the behaviors, attitudes, and beliefs of the user groups, ultimately helping our client better focus their product development efforts and shape how they engage with their users.
Engaging staff helped highlight policies impacting the use of robotics
Through our research, we soon found that while some hospitals sought to train and maintain surgical support teams others had a broader team of staff rotate through their robotically-assisted cases.
By engaging with surgeon users as well as their support staff, we learned that fostering a team environment helped with onboarding and mastery of robotic platforms. Further, keeping teams intact helps provide a greater sense of ownership, impacting how equipment is handled and attitudes around troubleshooting and problem solving.
Challenges
Balancing Logical Steps & Creative Leaps
Developing personas for healthcare clients is always a balancing act, as you use inductive and abductive reasoning to build your profiles. On one hand, I look to maintain the traceability of data, creating conclusions that are highly defensible, on the other, there’s a degree of making logical leaps to create compelling stories that feel genuine.
The Art of Content Delivery
Content prioritization was another challenge with this client team, my role often turned into coaching them through tradeoffs with our content strategy. In my experience, the power of personas comes from making research data memorable and accessible to the organization, when we pack too much information into a profile it actually reduces the impact of the personas. To strike a balance, I developed a two-page approach, where we kept the message on the profile pages simple by carving out a content-rich second page for teams who need additional content.
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