
Xanthi Scrimgeour, MHEd, MCHES & Stacy Robison, MHEd, MCHES, CommunicateHealth, Inc.
Xanthi Scrimgeour and Stacy Robison facilitated a pre-conference workshop titled, “User Centered Design for Audiences with Limited Literacy Skills: An Introduction to Research and Testing Methods for Print and Online Materials.”
The definition of User Centered Design (UCD) was provided as “Involving end-users (your audience) in the design and development of a product, message, or campaign.”

The workshop focused on the following:
- Steps to the User Centered Design process (Co-creation, Participatory design)
- Methods in getting to know your audience (or clients) in order to involve them in serving as “co-creators” in designing key marketing tools to be used by actual clients
- Methods to conduct user research and organizing information gathered
- Testing Methods for getting feedback from your target audiences
- How to involve participants with limited literacy
- Ways to save time and money on user research and testing
The facilitators provided 5 reasons to involve your actual “audience” as part of the co-creation/participatory design:
- Just because you think your material is awesome doesn’t mean that your audience has the same opinion.
- You can waste a lot of time and money developing materials and products that your actual audience will not use.
- Involving your current audience will allow you to assess whether or not your messages will be understood.
- Target audience members will be empowered and invested in the success of your product.
- It will make you a better communicator.
Both facilitators discussed the importance of talking directly to your audience (client, patient, etc.) to create “personas.” Personas are created based on a mix of people. It is based on actual research with your audience to prevent the persona from being a “stereotype” – and not necessarily related to people. One can achieve creating this step by performing focus groups, one on one client interviews, collage exercises, etc. It is important to also create a specialized group of individuals (recruits) to develop personas.
Our facilitators engaged attendees of the session in interactive exercises to further describe and understand the value of creating personas.