Winning stakeholders buy-in for a user-centric culture with persona study workshops.
The challenge
Ratehub wanted to heavily invest in their credit card product offerings. We realized that everything we knew about credit cards came from our colleagues, which were highly educated in the subject matter. Therefore, we set out to learn everything we can about our users by embarking on a persona study.
I recruited 20 Canadians between the age of 25-55, who were in the market for a new travel credit card and I conducted moderated interviews.
Some of the questions asked:
What credit cards do you have and what do you use them each for?
How do you like your current primary credit card?
What card features are the most important to you?
How did you choose the last card you applied for?
What made you feel confident to apply?
What did you wish you know before applying?
Then I did a card sorting exercise to determine if the card features we thought were important line up with what users really thought.
Distilling insights from this massive amount of interview notes and data was a monumental task.
I created a Miro board that tracked responses by categories, such as Feature priorities, Perks, Personal goals, Journey steps, Motivating and demotivating factors, Pain points, Triggers.
Then I grouped similar responses together to create clusters.
Slowly, a pattern emerged.
I created 3 core personas that are the most representative of our findings. These persona cards showcase their goals, aspirations, behaviour patterns, frustrations and user journey for getting a travel credit card.
I then created some persona matrix to help the business unit stakeholders make sense of where they sit on a spectrum of likelihood to use our product features.
This became the basis of how we think about products
This persona work contributed to a cultural shift where stakeholders started asking "who is this feature designed for", to me that's the biggest win.
People are more likely to care about something when they're having fun
The highlight of this project was the workshop that the design team organized to present our findings to the broader company. We were worried that this research was too intricate and it might be too dry to show as decks. Instead, we pooled our UX brains together to create a whole EXPERIENCE that our colleagues wouldn't forget.
Synthesis and analysis was labour intensive, could we have used AI?
At the time this research was done, OpenAI was not available to the public. In retrospects, the transcribing and summarization of research data, the creation of clusters and then persona patterns were extremely time consuming. While this was important work to be done, I wonder in 2024, we could have done this with a little bit more automation.