Within the field of UX Design and Human Computer Interaction (HCI), “personas” are a description of hypothetical users that present information such as demographics, behaviors, and attitudes about user groups. Personas help researchers build empathy when understanding groups of people by accounting for both the psychological and situational factors that influence people’s behavior.

A panel of design experts found that the most important benefits of personas are (Miaskiewicz & Kozar, 2011):

• Audience Focus (i.e., developing a product for the development of users and their goals)
• Challenge long-standing and often incorrect assumptions about users
• Prevent self-referential design (i.e., realizing that the user is different from the designer)

In order to take advantage of the insights provided by personas for public health issues, my colleagues and I have published a study profiling people based on traits such as extraversion, empathy, and situational circumstances (e.g., living in a larger space) to better understand motivations and attitudes toward quarantine compliance during the earlier stages of COVID (PDF below). We also intend to use data-driven personas to develop typologies of people for other public health issues, such as understanding psychological characteristics and situational circumstances for tobacco users and misinformation spreaders on social media.