Product Personas
My Financial Counsel is an online marketplace designed to match individuals with fee-only financial advisors.
The goal of this project was to gain a deeper understanding of the needs and goals of our target audience, and develop personas to drive our marketing and product strategy.
My Role
Product Designer, UX Researcher
Challenges
We knew our target audience was out there, but we didn’t have a good understanding of what these users’ goals or needs were. We needed to build some personas based on user interviews in order to drive our product strategy.
The Team
Stephen Carlson (me), Designer
Christine Su, CEO
Alan Yu, Director of Business Development
The Final Results
DESIGN PROCESS DETAILS BELOW ↓
DESIGN PROCESS DETAILS BELOW ↓
The Solution:
Customer Research
Two main goals:
Develop a deeper understanding of our users. How do we talk to our users in a way that speaks to their personal struggles, dreams, and financial goals? We wanted to connect on an emotional level.
Create customer personas. We wanted to use both real-world qualitative and quantitative research to identify what type of customer is most interested in our services.
Overview of the Process
Define the problem and goals
Research the problem space. Define a problem statement.
Do the interviews
Talk to people through structured interviews to better understand our audience.
Process the data
Organize the interview responses, looking for patterns, quotes, and insights.
Build the personas
Craft a set of personas to better represent our users.
Step 1
Define the Problem and Goals
The first step in the design process is always figuring out what problem needs to be solved. MFC had been operating for about a year, but wasn’t getting a whole lot of traction, because our target audience was very niche.
Christine (CEO) really believed in the cause of fee-only financial advisors, and felt confident that there was an audience out there who was looking for this type of advisors, but we were having a lot of difficulty figuring out how to find this type of person, and also how to talk to them.
Our Problem Statement
There are people who prefer the honest and straightforward payment structure of fee-only financial advisors, but these people make up a small slice of the audience pie. How might we identify this group of people and speak to their unique goals?
Step 2
Do the Interviews
I interviewed 9 people within our target audience constraints in order to better understand their financial habits. These were the steps I took for setting up and conducting the interviews:
Source and schedule the interviews. Our interviewees were found using contacts from the internal team, but we made conscious efforts to focus on diversity in our interview pool in order to minimize the chance of bias in our answers.
Send out pre-interview survey. This was done to collect an initial set of basic demographic data, in order to set expectations and speed things up for the live interview. This was also helpful for filtering out potential interviewees who would be outside the scope of our target users.
Complete the live interviews. I scheduled and completed each of the interviews, using a pre-written script. The interviews took place in person, over the phone, or on a video call. I took some basic notes, and also recorded the interview, for further later analysis.
Sample Questions
Here are a few of the questions I asked during each interview session. I have found that having an authentic curiosity about a person is the best way to get meaningful responses. I used a pre-written script of questions, but would routinely use follow-up questions to tease out more nuanced responses.
Do you feel ahead or behind in getting your personal finances in shape?
How would you rate your ownlevel of financial expertise?
How would you describe your approach to budgeting?
How do you manage financeswith your spouse or partner?
What is one thing about investing you wish you knew more about?
What are your thoughts on taking risks in life?
What’s a big life goal you’re hoping to accomplish in the next 5 years?
What specific event made you decide to get a financial advisor?
Step 3
Process the Data
After completing all the interviews, I went through the responses in order to organize the responses.
Affinity mapping. I pulled everyone’s answers from key questions and organized the responses into themes, in order to discover patterns.
Collecting memorable quotes. I wanted to have a collection of actual quotes that people said in the interview, in order to capture real-world ideas that reflected how people’s thinking.
Mapping to a 2x2 matrix. As part of the preparation for these interviews, I was talking with Christine, who had a hypothesis that everyone can be mapped on a matrix representing their financial knowledge vs. their ownership of personal finances. The x-axis represented a continuum from DIY-er to Outsourcer, and the y-axis represented a person’s level of financial expertise. This grid was the starting point of our persona map.
Affinity Mapping
This affinity map is in response to the interview question “What are some feelings or emotions you associate with money and finance,” which was the first key questions I asked each person.
An interesting takeaway here is how people have very mixed emotions about money and personal finance. The same person might say that thinking about finance is both stressful and exciting at the same time.
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It’s very common for people to have anxiety specifically around their checking account balance. They have the question, “How can I set things up so I don’t have to be checking my balance all the time?”
People see “budgeting” as not necessarily a way to track every dollar (although sometimes this is the case), but more often as a set of patterns or guard rails to follow.
Everyone agrees saving is good, but that doesn’t mean they do it. Those that do save regularly are not always saving as much or frequently as they would like.
It’s overwhelming to keep track of money stored in pseudo-bank accounts, e.g. PayPal, Square Cash, Venmo, Splitwise, etc.
On average, the people I interviewed self-reported their own financial expertise as a 68 out of 100.
Some commonly mentioned big financial goals: creating more independence around work, buying a house, having kids, diversifying investments, building long-term lifestyle stability, generating rental income, and getting more freelance work.
For SRIs (Socially Responsible Investments), people like this concept, but it’s difficult to do in practice. Also, most people are not willing to implement SRIs if it means a lower return.
Collect Memorable Quotes
This is a sample of just a few key quotes I pulled from the interview sessions, in order to make the respondents seem more relatable, and get a more relatable idea of what type of person we are talking to.
“In 10 years it would be nice to be debt free. We've set in place some pretty strong disciplines to start working that way.”
“I really wish I had learned more about this earlier in my life.”
“Money is not something that’s a given that I will have. But I didn’t learn about ways to use money to make more money.”
“Part of me wants to ignore finances and part of me wants to tackle my debt, so there's a tension of feeling very overwhelmed, but not feeling equipped.”
“Taking risks is necessary, but the challenge is determining the right risk for my unique lifestyle.”
“Saving money does not equal making money and people confuse the two! Your goals should be realistic around living the life you want to live, rather than saving every penny possible.”
“If you can put the bulk of resources toward one strategy that can benefit you the most, this is ideal, but it's hard to know what that strategy is."
“Risks are necessary but you need to know all the possible consequences and be willing to accept them.”
“Because thinking about money every day is so stressful, how do I figure out a simple rule or spending limit to automate things so I don't have to constantly monitor my bank account?”
“Money is stressful on the day-to-day level, but it can feel good when I spend money on something practical and useful, creating moments of joy.”
Map to a 2×2 Matrix
As I processed the interview responses, gradually categories of user types began to emerge. The most clear division were those who already actively use a financial advisor (the outsourcers) and those who used a “do it yourself” approach to their financial planning (the DIY-ers). These groups are shown below along the x-axis.
Within each of these two groups, some interviewees had a high level of financial knowledge and expertise – something we later began to refer to as “Financial IQ” – and others had a lower level of experience around finances. This range is mapped out below along the y-axis.
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Through this process, four categories of users began gradually to emerge:
Self-advisors. These people manage their own investments, and typically view it (to some extent) as a personal hobby.
Validators. These people know a lot about finance, but like to regularly check in with a professional in order to validate that they are maximizing their investment returns.
Delegators. These people self-acknowledge that finance is not an area of expertise for them, and so they hand off this responsibility to a professional advisor.
Overwhelmed. These people are trying to do everything themselves, but don’t know what they are doing. They are desperately looking for some type of help.
Step 4
Build the Personas
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A key insight we realized in the middle of this process, was instead of visually mapping out on the x-axis “DIY Financial Planning” vs. Outsource to Financial Advisor, a better way to capture the emotional range of our users was a continuum from “Feels Behind” to “Feels Great” about their financial situation.
These two attributes generally match up with whether a person responds more proactively or more reactively to some financially-relevant life event.
Conclusion
The Results
In the end, these personas were highly successful–both in helping to understand our users, and also to focus our product and marketing strategy.
Here’s my plan for building on these personas:
Continue interviewing, on a continual basis. This would be used to verify that our personas were accurate, as well as give us a place to validate new hypotheses related to how people think about their finances.
Enhance the personas using quantitative research. I had created a survey to use for quantitative research, but unfortunately we did not have the budget at the time to launch this survey.
Create a messaging strategy handbook based on personas. This would go into more detail at an executional level on how to uniquely speak to each type of persona.
