GoCompare User Persona Creation
GoCompare was looking to tackle a new account section for their comparison platform. The existing account section was out of date and was often a pain point for users. Due to the issues with the account area, leadership set the task of redesigning the account section with the user’s needs in mind. To ensure that I addressed these needs I began the task of creating user personas focused on this area.
The challenge
Collecting our data
I started by interviewing 10 users who had purchased insurance for themselves or others within the past 6 months. I preferred those quoting for others as "multi-quote" appeared in the top 3 issues our users faced for the past 9 months.
A 2-part task was set up for the interviews. Part 1 being a generalised chat. Having the users discuss things like, how they would go about getting insurance, what they look for from their comparison sites, how they store their details, and how they'd like to be reminded to name a few.
Part 2 was a chance to have users go through the process of accessing their account sections on live sites. Asking them to share their screen and get their thoughts on the existing account area. For this part, we actively steered the users to competitors as we felt we understood our website well (although we did have 2 users instinctively visit GoCompare.)
These interviews resulted in 655 notes total and 3 days of intense grouping/theme deciphering ready to be brought into our personas.
Creating the framework
While conducting these interviews I wanted to conduct some research into how I wanted to build/synthesise the personas. I wanted the personas to be specialised for the account section and not follow what you'd typically see for a marketing persona (When sharing with the wider team I made sure to mention this to avoid confusion and misuse.) This meant I looked around at how other companies were handling their personas.
One that stood out as being relevant was the GOV.UK accessibility personas. This is a set of personas focused purely on the different accessibility needs of users of the internet and their sites.
These personas seemed like a perfect fit for this situation as they broke them down into different levels of detail (something I wanted to include to make it easier to digest by the wider teams) as well as the information they gathered.
GOV.UK also included what I called an "inspirational quote" - This was a quote that you could easily read through and get into the headspace of the persona. This was a key idea I wanted to take through to our personas.
My next step was to create a framework inside of Miro based on the information they shared in their personas. This would then give us the skeleton to build our new personas.
Defining our personas
When defining the different themes found during the interview stage, we wanted to keep in mind some of the areas we wanted to address within our account section. This meant that we could then tailor our final personas for our needs rather than using a generic persona document. We looked at several factors that are shown below:
Level of understanding
Completion Rate
Familiarity with the process
Life experience
Incentives
Reminder preference
One factor to call out was our choice to remove age from our personas and replace it with "Life experience." This was due to a realisation that came from our interviews. We quickly realised that due to insurance being optional (for the most part) many users of varying ages had little experience with the "adult world." By that, I mean, little to no experience of how bills work, what is needed to get insured, or how to find the best choice from them.
For example:
User A
A 19-year-old who has handled paying their phone bill and insurance for their phone and car and since moving out they have handled their contents insurance.
User B
A 30-year-old user who has relied on family and loved ones to take care of bills having just sent them money when needed so has no clue who they are with or what they need to do if they were left to figure it out themselves.
Because of this we chose to remove age in lew of “Life experience” so that we could give a more accurate picture of who our potential users are.
The final personas
After defining our data I was able to come up with three different personas that the team could now use to complete the work required. These three personas can be found below. To make these personas as easy to digest as possible I split the description into two parts. The left being quick digestible facts so you can understand the concept at a glance and the right being a more in-depth look into the persona.
