Coddlers, Scientists, Adventurers, and Opportunists: Personas to Inform Online Health Community Development
This work addresses the problem of content overload for OHC users, offering insights for personalized content delivery, though it is incremental as it builds on existing social types in online communities.
The study tackled the challenge of users being overwhelmed by content in online health communities (OHCs) by identifying four personas—Coddlers, Scientists, Adventurers, and Opportunists—based on interviews with 14 diabetes-focused users and 2 administrators, revealing how these personas inform interaction behaviors and attitudes.
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.