My group is focusing our project on the elderly, and more specifically on retirement homes. As there are many types of retirement homes and many levels of care that residents can receive in these homes, we needed to use this stage as a way to narrow our focus on a specific aspect or stage of retirement homes.
We started off this process by breaking down different aspects of people’s lives into 5 categories: family, demographic, lifestyle, health, and social. After listing different variables that could exist within these five categories, we decided to make two different personas which represent two people in very different situations, but who both fall are relevant to our previous research.
Our first persona is of an older man who has been in his retirement home for a good amount of time, and remains largely independent. Obviously the persona goes more in depth, but we thought this was a very relevant persona for our research because a lot of our interviews were of individuals who were currently in retirement homes.
Our second persona was one that our research was less revolved around but this type of person seems to have come up a lot in our findings. We made a persona for an individual in their mid 50s who are exploring the option of moving into a retirement community. These people seem to be the least tapped market and can be influenced and marketed to in order to change their ways, opposed to individuals in retirement communities who have largely set routines.
We decided to create an empathy map for the persona of the prospective retirement community resident. The empathy map has really given detail to our picture of the ideal person we are targeting and has put on paper what as a group we found in our research. In this way creating the personas and empathy map have been very useful in defining and narrowing our focus, as well as giving us a direction in which to continue our project in the future.