Introducing: Personas to Inform Biomedical Data Products

Connecting folks at Fred Hutch with data, software, and computing resources starts with developing a deep understanding of their needs, motivations, and workflows. To support all of the teams developing and maintaining internal digital infrastructure, we have created a collection of curated personas which describe several types of roles and working styles that are common across our workplace.

A persona is a fictional person who represents a role: their tasks, their challenges, who else they work with, and other information that is relevant to how they interact with technology in the course of their work. Each persona endeavors to shed light on: who is working in a particular space, what they would like to accomplish, their worries, obstacles they face, and what tools and data sources they use. So far this collection of personas has two thematic foci: researchers who are engaged in biomedical data analysis, and folks who work with patient records and the data produced by those records.

These personas have already informed our work on PROOF, a graphical interface for managing WDL workflows on our SLURM cluster, and CARDS, Fred Hutch’s future clinical data resource. Thank you so much to everyone who participated in the many conversations that contributed to this work.

These personas are meant to be a work in progress, updated as we learn more about the needs of our community. If you do not see yourself represented in these personas, and you would like to contribute your experience to our future development of this resource, please email us at data@fredhutch.org and mention “personas” in the subject line, or fill out  this form.