Charles Schwab: persona development
Problem
Multiple product teams at Schwab lacked up-to-date personas, so they didn’t adequately understand their customer base or user groups. We needed to create new research-based personas to enable these teams to create new products, improve existing products, and shape research efforts with specific users in mind.
Goals
Empower product teams to better meet user needs and business goals. Support the creation and improvement of relevant, profitable products designed for real users. Support effective recruiting for research purposes.
phase 1: research brief & project kick-off
Design creates a collaborative page for each product or project in Confluence.
Product managers fill out a research brief.
Researcher interviews product and design.
Product provides previous research documentation for reference.
Research schedules regular meetings with product and design to support ongoing research.
Phase 2: Stakeholder Interviews
Participants: Researcher interviews stakeholders (e.g., product, management, development) about product or project.
Content: Stakeholders provide information about product history, product vision, project goals, assumed user types, pain points, ideal features, precedents, competition, key challenges, and anticipated markers of success.
Documentation: The researcher produces a summary document based on stakeholder interviews.
phase 3: persona creation & user story backlog
Research creates personas with representative technical capability, income, profession, goals, motivations, limitations, age, and gender.
User story backlogs are created and user types are organized into categories.
Design refers to user story backlog to make improvements according to prioritized user needs.
phase 4: persona-informed research
Usability issues, based on personas, are outlined and explained with screenshots, citing correlation to heuristics and defining severity on a scale from 1-3 or 1-4.
Screenshots of the product are marked with arrows and explanatory text boxes, calling attentioin to persona-specific usability issues and suggesting potential solutions.
Research is conducted as necessary over time, leveraging persona data. Research methods may include usability studies, diary studies, in-depth interviews, and ethnographies. Research is conducted with persona-appropriate recruits.
impact
Personas provide common for research, design, and product development conversations.
Product changes take more specific user needs into account, resulting in a higher rate of user satisfaction.
Persona-specific data guides future research, supports a more thorough design process, and enhances realistic product planning.
Research studies are fielded with accurate and realistic user groups, resulting more timely and cost-effective product development.
Prioritized usability issues and recommendations guide future research, support design decisions, and improve product planning.