Smartline Research
Why Smartline uses community personas
At Smartline, we’re incredibly lucky to have a real-life community of over 200 households to help with our research. However, when it comes to talking about our people’s needs, or looking at user-centred design, we want to keep our participants anonymous. That’s why we created the Smartline personas.
These fictional characters are based on research and are used to protect personal privacy, as well as making data and information digestible for different audiences.
What is a Smartline persona?
We have eight Smartline personas. They are based on research among our real-life communities, although none of the personas replicate any individual closely. They represent eight broad groups of people.
Personas are widely used in many fields, and they’re commonly used in marketing to help organisations target their advertising. However, they seemed to us to be the perfect way to communicate research without compromising people’s privacy.
Why did we create Smartline personas?
We wanted to communicate the needs, aspirations, strengths, motivations, experiences, behaviours and lifestyle of people who live in Cornwall’s social housing.
Our personas are an engaging way of presenting complex data about health and wellbeing. They help people to identify with the data and speak to a broad audience.
Click on the image to view our Smartline personas
How did we create the personas?
Listen to Dr. Tamaryn Menneer at the Data Challenge Cornwall, as she explains more about how we created the personas.
We created the personas using data collected in 2017-18 from adults living in 329 social housing households in Cornwall.
This data included people’s socioeconomic position, household composition, home environment, technology ownership, pet ownership, smoking, social cohesion, volunteering, caring, wellbeing, physical and mental health, and activity.
We grouped similar households using a mathematical technique known as cluster analysis, coming up with eight groups, each headed by a separate persona.
Next, we added information we’d obtained from interviews and sensor data, such as people’s hobbies and electricity usage. We then found photographs to represent each persona (these are stock images, we haven’t used any actual photographs from the Smartline community).
How do personas help us to understand communities?
We use the personas to introduce different perspectives in workshops, and to ensure we gather information from a range of households in our research.
As an example, imagine that we wanted to understand how people use smart technology. To make sure that we approach a representative group of participants, we would involve at least one participant from each persona category.
How do the personas help Smartline’s research?
The Smartline personas have proved to be an engaging way of presenting data. They’re so much more accessible than the raw, anonymised data, meaning that we can communicate in a more interesting and impactful way.
We have also been asked to share our experience and methods with public health services, to help inform their work on persona development.
Additional Research
Smartline Personas: Broadening understanding about communities
Smartline’s Personas have been co-designed by the University of Exeter and participants in the Smartline Project. Personas are fictional characters based on real-life research.
Who is involved in the research?
Smartline’s Personas have been co-designed by the Smartline team and participants in the Smartline Project, led by Dr Andrew James Williams.
Further information
This work is published in the JMIR Journal of Public Health and Surveillance as Fostering Engagement with Health and Housing Innovation: Development of Participant Personas in a Social Housing Cohort by Dr Andrew James Williams and others.