Diabetes Experience Mapping
Inspired by the "Day in the Life" exercise featured in The Persona Lifecycle by Pruitt and Adlin, I decided to customize the exercise to help us collect qualitative data for our "Care for Diabetes" program. I ran a brainstorming session with our subject matter experts to generate a list of thoughts, feelings, people, and objects that were likely to be associated with diabetes. This list informed the content and graphics used to develop the mapping worksheets.
Our intern recruited a participant and helped me run the mapping session. We provided the participant with worksheets, glue, scissors, and a sharpie. A horizontal line was drawn down a long sheet of butcher paper. The participant was told that the dot drawn at the beginning of the line represented the point in time when she was first diagnosed with diabetes. Our participant was then instructed to "talk out loud" as she used any of the available materials to document her experiences across the timeline from initial diagnosis to where she is today. At the beginning of the exercise, she relied more heavily on the worksheets, but as she became more comfortable, she began drawing her own images and writing her own notes. I videotaped the session, being sure to focus the camera on the mapping exercise and not the participant. Our participant talked through her journey with diabetes, from her initial feelings of guilt to her successful management with diabetes. the introduction and acceptance of this mapping exercise opened the doors for it to be used as a tool in subsquent user research for HealthMedia programs.
