Outcome: the creation of our Hatch money mindsets using the jobs-to-be-done framework
The Problem
We had 5 personas at Hatch, but we only used 2, Chris and Helen. When listening to teammates talk about our personas, it was easy to pick up that Chris was the guy that was in the know about investing and liked to talk about it, and that Helen was someone who wasn't very confident and was started out in investing. Some of the wider team found this enough information to be helpful, but as product designers, we wanted to understand our customers more. It was increasingly hard to match our users in interviews into our 5 personas, we almost never spoke to Melanie or Katie, they simply were not Hatch customers, or if they were, we never spoke to them.
We had 5 personas at Hatch, but we only used 2, Chris and Helen. When listening to teammates talk about our personas, it was easy to pick up that Chris was the guy that was in the know about investing and liked to talk about it, and that Helen was someone who wasn't very confident and was started out in investing. Some of the wider team found this enough information to be helpful, but as product designers, we wanted to understand our customers more. It was increasingly hard to match our users in interviews into our 5 personas, we almost never spoke to Melanie or Katie, they simply were not Hatch customers, or if they were, we never spoke to them.
The Start
Personas can be invaluable for giving a general overview of users they contain; sentiments, attributes, goals, motivations, and any other information that is deemed useful or relevant to highlight. As product designers, we didn't care about gender, income, or living situation. So we began by highlighting useful information to us on our current personas.
It became obvious that the only information we really cared about in our current personas was their, motivations, behaviors, and barriers (at the bottom of the page). But what we really cared about was our different user's Jobs-to-be-done.
Money can be a taboo subject, so we also wanted to look at people's general mental models around money. We knew others will have completed far more comprehensive research than we ever could, with our small team and time, so we set out to find some useful insights from other researchers. We took inspiration from Fjord's Study: Mindset Segmentation which aimed to understand banking customers' attitudes toward money.
After much research and analysis, we moved away from our personas to money mindsets. Design your products around mindsets, not just personas.
The Solution
We wanted genderless personas as investing one of the misconceptions Hatch is about breaking is that investing, "it's a man's thing". In fact, Forbes produced an article explaining Why women are better investors.
After much research and analysis, we moved away from our 5 gendered personas, to our 4 money mindsets with a motivation-first approach.
Our money mindsets helped us with every project, from start to end we understood our targeted users, their different needs, and frustrations.
Work completed whilst at Hatch