Personas in O2O Mobile Healthcare: A Method for Identifying and Creating User Groups

Persona is a useful technique to obtain a group of target users that share common behavioral characteristics. However, persona analysis in mobile healthcare system is particularly difficult due to the complexity, ad hoc and multi-scenario nature of healthcare processes. In this paper, a personas method is proposed for the identification and creation of user groups in mobile healthcare. The approach utilizes sequence alignment, clustering technique to identify user groups. Then based on the behaviors of the user groups, we perfect the personas by constructing a decision tree of multiple user attributes. The approach is demonstrated in a case study of mobile medical appointment. The result shows that the method overcomes some drawbacks of current methods, and it is less subjective, more efficient, and less reliant on specialized expertise.