People Models: Many Lows but still useful

Sally is a skeptic. She is definitely a skeptic. Wait, is she?

It’s been a couple of months but I still think about Sally.

Who is Sally?

She is a woman we interviewed for a financial services project. In this project, I and two other researchers interviewed the panel of interviewees to understand how they think about and use financing products(eg. Credit Cards, Buy Now Pay Later)

In Sally’s interview, she talked about how she never used credit cards. She liked to buy everything with cash. She had never used a credit card and wasn’t sure what to make of credit card companies. Nonetheless, there was undeniable evidence that she wanted nothing to do with credit cards.

As we synthesized information on interviewees we determined 4 personas to “bucket” people

1. Enthusiasts: People who are eager to use credit cards. They may have just gotten their first credit card and are excited to use it.
2. Builders: People who are using financing products to reach financial goals. Eg. they may have a few credit cards to build credit.
3. Skeptics: People who are wary of credit cards. They may have had bad experiences or know someone who had bad experiences with credit cards. As they may have struggled in the past potentially with a dip in credit score, they want nothing to do with credit cards.
4. Aficionados: These people are experts in managing their finances. They may have had a couple of financing products in the past but however their experience was, they have a handle on it now, knowing what they like and do not like.

So is Sally a Skeptic?

How about a little more background on Sally?

She is originally from a country that is heavily reliant on a cash-based/pay-as-you-go economic structure. Sally also supports her family in her home country financially.

So for Sally, her understanding of finances is built on what you actually have and are able to afford.

Does that make her fit into the bucket of a skeptic? Kind of. Maybe?

Because she doesn’t trust this credit-based system and besides how will she provide for her family in a different country with credit cards, she needs physical cash.

So is it accurate to bundle her up with Pat who had about 15 credit cards in the past? Spent so much paying off interest and so only uses Buy Now Pay Later options?

Maybe we should have sub personas under the skeptics’ umbrella. But is there a critical mass of this user for the financial services company to engage with separately?

These are the complexities in modeling people. As long as data capabilities can only characterize people in buckets of characteristics, the necessary evil of grouping people remains.

And the limitations force us to determine behavioral patterns for designers and other stakeholders to make design decisions that hopefully serve needs in a personalized way.

In the traditional framework of design processes, we think of understanding people as empathy. I am learning that in practice, empathy might be an ambitious way we are describing the work we do.

I think understanding people and putting them into persona buckets potentially has to do with finding what is true or core to people’s needs and where they intersect with what a product, service, or experience is attempting to offer.

This process may have sprinkles of empathy but what it suggests definitively is a commitment to understanding a truth about a person’s needs that a company can serve.

So in Sally’s case, This financial services company may provide her with Buy Now Pay Later options which allows them to engage with her. Sally could value this service because she can get what she needs on credit without the repercussions of credit monitoring which is foreign to her. This insight is a level of truth about Sally’s experience.

What Sally may really need is a crash course on credit in the US and how she can use credit to grow her financial health. But for this financial services company, while they can provide some financial education, it’s not their bread and butter. And, again Sally and people like Sally may not be a major group of interest to them. As designers, it’s our responsibility to suggest what she needs but ultimately the goal is always to find where meaningful connection points will be. That goal is accomplished only with a commitment to finding the intersection of a person’s truth and a product, service, or experience’s essence.