Coddlers, Scientists, Adventurers, and Opportunists: Personas to Inform Online Health Community Development

TL;DR

This study identifies four distinct user personas in online health communities for diabetes, providing insights to improve personalized content delivery and enhance user engagement in large-scale health forums.

Contribution

The paper introduces four novel user personas that capture diverse behaviors and attitudes in OHCs, informing personalized content strategies for better community support.

Findings

Four user personas: Coddlers, Scientists, Adventurers, Opportunists

Personas can overlap and evolve over time

Implications for personalized content delivery in OHCs

Abstract

As online health communities (OHCs) grow, users find it challenging to properly search, read, and contribute to the community because of its overwhelming content. Our goal is to understand OHC users' needs and requirements for better delivering large-scale OHC content. We interviewed 14 OHC users with interests in diabetes to investigate their attitudes and needs towards using OHCs and 2 OHC administrators to assess our findings. Four personas -Coddlers, Scientists, Adventurers, and Opportunists- emerged, which inform users' interaction behavior and attitudes with OHCs. An individual can possess the characteristics of multiple personas, which can also change over time. Our personas uniquely describe users' OHC participation intertwined with illness contexts compared to existing social types in general online communities. We discuss broader implications back to the literature and how our findings apply to other illness contexts in OHCs. We end with requirements for personalized delivery of large-scale OHC content.