Understanding our members
We’re Dave & Mark: part of a team that’s building the new-look Trade Me. Welcome to part 1 of an 8 part series where we break down how we’ve been doing this from a product designer’s perspective.
Understanding our members is fundamental, that’s why it’s the first of our Design Principles:
“Good Design is Human Centred. People are at the heart of what we do. By understanding their motivations, we create value by solving real problems for real people. When we design for people, we design for the entire experience.”
Having greater insight into who our members are, why they do what they do, what motivates them and how these motivations affect their behaviours, helps inform our design decisions.
So let me tell you more about these members, the context they operate in, why and how we personify them, and how we put this to use in our daily practice.
Who are our members?
We have 2 million active members — so a decent cross section of New Zealand’s 4.6 million population. A near 50/50 mix of male and female with an average age of 41. Our members are ‘Property Buyers’, ‘Sports Fans’, ‘Pet Lovers’, ‘Farmers’, ‘Young Families’ and ‘DIYers’ to name but a few.
What’s the context?
Trade Me has a number of business units that include Marketplace, Property, Jobs, Motors, Services, Insurance and Holiday Houses. Of course, our members don’t see the distinction in the same way we do internally — it’s all Trade Me to them. A member may browse properties and rare and collectable pre-1950’s annuals (yip that’s a category) all in the one session. However, a single member will change their behaviours depending on the context. This isn’t that surprising — but it is a reminder why understanding the behaviours and traits of our members is so important. A member’s behaviours looking for a house to buy may be completely different to their behaviours when browsing those rare and collectable pre-1950’s annuals.
Why personify our members?
Personifying our members keeps things real. With simple visual representations that we can continually reference, we keep our members front of mind when designing. This helps us:
- Be human centred
Reminding ourselves that we are building and evolving products for real people. Putting ourselves in their shoes and empathising with their needs and frustrations. - Remain focused
Having a clear picture of who our members are helps us define our approach. It enables the team to focus on a “manageable and memorable cast of characters, instead of focusing on thousands (or millions) of individuals”. - Measure decisions
It’s a way to evaluate ideas and directions objectively, prompting questions such as; “what behaviour will this feature impact?”, “Where does this persona experience the most difficulty?’, “How can we make that better?” and “Were we successful, did we make it better?”.
How do we personify our members?
We use a combination of personas and customer profiles. Personas group our members according to specific behaviours, and customer profiles capture member demographics. These are formulated from member interviews, surveys, analytics and desk research by our dedicated user research team.
Putting this into practice each day…
Personas and customer profiles + journey maps = 😍
Having personified our users, we can form assumptions for what they will need, what they value, their abilities, and also their limitations when performing a task. By breaking down a particular task into a series of sequential steps (aka a journey map) we can visualise this task and how our members’ behaviours are affected at each step.
Cognitive walkthroughs
For those of you familiar with cognitive walkthroughs, you’ll know this is a really simple and powerful methodology for identifying problems with the interactions you’ve built to support users’ tasks. By getting someone — usually a co-worker — to assume the identity of one of our personas and try to complete a task whilst speaking aloud their thought processes, it’s possible to spot blockers, gaps and confusions in interactions, as well as to gain better insights into ways to design things.
As you can see, understanding our members is first and foremost in our process.
Now that we’ve talked about who we’re designing for, let’s talk about how we bring internal stakeholders together to best serve our members under the one Trade Me site. That’s up next, with Mark…
