Introduction
At Coinbits, we’re dedicated to improving the UX of bitcoin so that more people can benefit from it. In our ongoing commitment to transparency and community engagement, we recently made our product roadmap public. Now, we’re excited to share another work product which was made as a part of a Summer of Bitcoin project: Bitcoin Personas.
Persona pitfalls
Coinbits is a family-run bitcoin-only exchange. We are a small startup with a big vision – to build the first #HybridBanking platform that seamlessly combines bitcoin and fiat financial services.
Our team is mostly made up of engineers, but several of us also have a background in product and design. We recently decided to revamp our user personas in order to strengthen our foundation for continued product-market fit.
Personas are fictional descriptions of target users and are used to focus development teams on the human needs of the people for whom they build products. Although they have been a mainstay of UX and innovation teams for decades, in recent years, personas have developed a reputation of being a high-investment project with questionable ROI. This is largely because they tend to be underutilized by the audience for whom they are created – internal engineers, designers, and executives.
Too often, beautifully-designed personas are created by a UX team, presented in a meeting, and promptly forgotten. And even if they aren’t, do they really provide product insights, or are they too fictional, fluffy, and final?
When personas fail, it is likely that one or more of these reasons is the culprit:
- They try to be too broad and inclusive instead of specific and exclusive.
- They don’t tell a character-driven story; they do not feel like real people.
- They go big on superfluous details.
- There are too many of them so they become hard to keep in mind during the product development process.
A better approach
We believe that the best way to approach personas is to think of them as summaries of user research in which the whole development team participated. In other words, engineers, executives, and designers really should have been present during a substantial portion of the user interviews. If a UX team goes off to do research and comes back with a deliverable, the rest of the team will have missed out on the opportunity to build direct, empathetic bonds with the real people who use the company’s products.
Instead, consider the work product to be the interview itself, and conceive of the personas as more akin to documentation of that work product.
Ideally, to run a persona project, a UX owner plays the role of servant leader of a qualitative research project. He or she guides conversations among engineers and users – and then immortalizes the work in a deliverable that is rich in detail and easily surfaced later. In this way, personas serve the purpose of keeping research insights alive for as long as possible.
Methodology
Our product is currently only available to U.S.-based customers, so…
Read More: Bitcoin Personas: How Coinbits Approaches Crafting User Experience