Personas in Early Stage Product Design of a Medical Device

This work covers the practical appliance and academic inspection of usability methods, in particular personas, in the early design stage of a medical device. User Centered Design has become an important factor for the development and launch of medical devices. International standards are demanding the appliance and documentation of the usability. The standards prescribe a usability engineering process throughout the complete development of a medical product.
For the practical part of the thesis user research was carried out in interviews with the primary usability stakeholders. Based on the interview data personas were designed and applied as primary personas to the different potential design strategies. The personas were introduced as posters to the industry partner together with the general concept of personas. The usability engineering process as demanded by the recently published standards was reviewed and brought in context of this study.
In the academic part methods for data acquisition and analysis are reviewed. The main focus is a critical inspection of the persona method. The current status of scientific research was explored especially looking on studies that proof or disproof the effectiveness of the method. From the different creation procedures described in the literature the best suitable approach for this work was chosen and documented in detail. A persona concept was created covering the design issues like naming, visualization and presentation. Additional attention is turned on applying unconventional methods like research in internet forums and the recruiting process in unfamiliar problem domains.