Any kind of design and development process requires a thorough and deep understanding of your target customers or in other words, your users. User personas are fictional characters that represent this target audience. While the user personas are fictional, they are created using user surveys, interviews and other kinds of research that you collect in the initial stages.
Creating personas help you visualize users as real people. By doing this, you can better relate to their limitations, struggles, goals etc. thus helping you design an application with better user flows and user experience that is more optimized to their users needs.
This is even more important when it comes to designing financial applications because it is crucial to get a clear picture of their needs, preferences and purchasing journey by developing detailed buyer personas.
Generally speaking fintech buyers tend to be decision makers in their own organizations and their motivations or preferences for buying fintech products or services will be different.
Now that we’ve understood why crafting user personas is so important for financial applications, let us move on to understanding how to build user personas.
Conduct Qualitative User Research
Start by interviewing various users of your product, and understand their pains, needs, and goals through questionnaires or interviews. This is the starting point to creating customer journeys.
Secondary Qualitative Research
Conduct interviews with people in your team who work the most closely with these users and have adequate knowledge about the user group.
Organise Your Findings
Identify your primary user personas who are relevant to the product and then those secondary user personas who may have additional needs.
Describe and Visualise Your Personas
Bring your personas to life by adding in tiny details and visualising them so that you can best cater to the needs of those personas.
Iterate as Needed
It is important to keep the design process fluid and update your personas with any new details throughout so that the designs you are creating are made for actual humans and are solving the right problems.
What are the aspects that are important to be captured when developing brand personas for Fintech applications? Let’s take a look.
- Trust
Trust is extremely important to get users to adopt the financial product. However understanding the degree of trust that users have is difficult to capture through user research. It needs to be understood by observing users and being able to read through the lines.
The survey or the questionnaire needs to be formed in such a way that the user is able to reveal their true feelings and you are able to understand what is the current level of trust that they have in the platform.
2. Socio-economic class or income
Based on the socio-economic class of your users, your application will differ greatly. Therefore you need to include questions that help you roughly understand the income of your users. This information can even be gathered through secondary interviews conducted with the other teams that interact with your customers.
Once you understand this aspect of your users, you can design an application that your users are comfortable using.
3. Tech savvy-ness of your users
While most millennial and gen-z customers are extremely comfortable with conducting transactions online, some older people still aren’t. Understanding how comfortable your users are with mobile applications is important to design the best experience for them. Conduct usability testing on any existing fintech products to see how comfortable they are.
3. Risk appetite
Risk appetite differs across users depending on their age group and various other factors. Although some products only deal with the customer’s money indirectly, it is an excellent idea to understand how comfortable the user is with taking risks. Running quantitative surveys and asking follow-up questions on the answers provided in these surveys will give us enough insight in most cases. This is something that should be definitely included in the persona so that the fintech business can nudge the users in the right direction of risk that is comfortable to the users
Conclusion
Audiences are varied and unique. By crafting user personas that cater to your audience specifically you can design a platform or application that is set for success.
