Who are using SDOH & Place data?

A wide range of users leverage SDOH and place data for various purposes. To ensure The SDOH & Place Project effectively serves its target audience, our team used a human-centered design (HCD) approach, prioritizing user needs from the outset. We began by collaborating with stakeholders and technical advisory groups to explore initial user needs and identify key personas representing potential users. These personas, while fictional, were grounded in reality, embodying the goals, needs, motivations, and pain points of our users.

These initial personas became central to our design process, and we recognized the importance of refining them throughout the project's development. We hypothesized that these refined personas would accurately reflect our users, but we knew we needed to validate this. Therefore, we established a process of continuous engagement with various stakeholders, including Super Users and community toolkit fellows.

To further corroborate our findings and ensure we were on the right track, we conducted a broader User-Centered Design (UCD) survey. The results of this survey confirmed that professionals in public health application development, like our users, actively involve users throughout the application lifecycle. This reinforced the importance of our user-centric approach and validated the effectiveness of the process we had established. The culmination of our work is reflected in the following user personas, which represent our target audience:

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Adila, Advocate

Adila is a dedicated 20-year-old community center volunteer in Sacramento, CA, who is working to improve food equity and sovereignty by creating a resource map of healthy food options in the neighborhood. She supports initiatives and local events fostering a sense of unity and well-being, while going to school full time in a practical degree. Eager to explore new opportunities and options, she brings a fresh perspective to community engagement and is always ready to tackle exciting new projects. She’s also interested in building on her technical skills to get a good paying job in the future.

Pain Points:

• Unable to figure out which is the best option for her to pick data from
• Has never coded before, so nervous about how much time it will take to figure out and troubleshoot, as she’ll need to figure it out on her own

Goals:

• Generate a useful, low-maintenance application that will last beyond her time at the community organization, that’s easy for her non-technical colleagues can take over
• Wants to engage more with people outside of community group to gauge needs

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Anish, Analyst

Anish is a 32-year-old health analyst at a suburban hospital in Petersburg, VA, who is developing a dynamic community health assessment map that considers contextual factors to address health disparities and patient population needs. He creates health maps that explore real-life factors like social, economic, and environmental aspects that affect patient well-being in the Petersburg area. He works with health providers directly and shares his analysis with healthcare planning officials.

Pain Points:

• The GIS analyst colleague who is anxious about this project overall and wants to do it the way it’s always been done
• Learning new libraries/tools to build the dashboard

Goals:

• Create a flexible and dynamic workflow to produce maps and data viz. within the organization
• Make a data dashboard with 5 indicators, highlighting the boundaries of hospital community

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Renee, Researcher

Renee is a 24 year old researcher at Liberal Arts College in Jackson, MS, who is seeking to translate research findings for the public . She strives to make complex findings relatable through her passion for bridging the gap between research and the public. She also has insights into contextual factors that uncover and address environmental disparities, ensuring a healthier, more equitable community for all.

Pain Points:

• Has multiple competing priorities that make little available time to hunt for new types of data in a new field, as she deeply studies complex quantitative data to compare to qualitative data
• The time it takes to gather quantitative data for her work

Goals:

• Bring geospatial application (maps) to existing research theory and practice
• Reveal unknown and ignored stories or experiences via storymaps and counter-cartographies which she can also publish and share with others

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Phoebe, Policymaker

Phoebe is a 56 year old locally elected city official in Davenport, IA, who aims to bring multi-sector partners together for problem solving. Beyond her official duties, she is a community catalyst who brings diverse partners together to creatively solve problems around greenspaces. Her leadership reflects a commitment to building a more connected, inclusive, and green urban landscape for everyone in Davenport.

Pain Points:

• There is difficulty in making progress within a multi-organizational political landscape
• Quality of data can affect the analysis

Goals:

• Address lack of greenspace through specific policy change
• Develop a data-driven application to share with network, build reputation as a tech-savvy leader, and get re-elected

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The user personas presented here are simplified versions of the personas that were used in developing the Data Discovery tool. Our explorations into user discovery included items such as swimlane diagrams, interests, needs and expectations, influences, and motivations. There was also a Design Sprint which was used to further develop the personas and confirm the findings. Participants engaged with the personas by creating empathy maps, analyzing competitors, sketching mockups, etc., which were then utilized in the creation of the final prototype. The full persona details along with artifacts from brainstorming sessions and the Design Sprint is available on our Figma file.

The goal of the SDOH and Place Project is to make the tool as accessible as possible to most common users, and empathizing with them was a significant way to accomplish this.