How (and why) we built our new probate service on customer needs
Today’s a big day at Farewill — we’re soft-launching our probate service.
Probate is needed after about half of deaths in England and Wales — it’s an official document obtained from a probate registry. We’ll be taking away the hassle and worry by dealing with all aspects of the probate application on behalf of our customers. It’s Farewill’s second major offering, joining our hugely successful wills product.
We’ve worked hard over the past few months to build a probate service that’s based on problems — problems faced by families after the death of a loved one, at a time when probate is often the last thing they want to deal with. Here’s how we approached it.
Discovering user needs
It was important to us to discover problems for ourselves. Not copy other probate services, not assume others were doing it right, not base our plans or hearsay or guesswork.
Early on, we ran a focus group with bereaved relatives. Focus groups get a bad rap sometimes (maybe I’ll blog about it sometime). But in the right circumstances, they’re fantastic. For us, it provided detailed, honest insight into 5 strangers’ unique experiences with grief and probate. It helped us frame the problem and base decisions on first-hand evidence.
We gathered market research — some of which is surprisingly helpful on a qualitative (a more individual) basis, with quotes and case studies. It’s crucial on a quantitative (big numbers) level too — for example, knowing that 70% of deaths in the UK are uncomplicated from a legal/financial point of view helps us focus on the majority and hone in on what matters. We did other research, from speaking at length to people and organisations in the sector to mystery shopping. It all helped build a picture of our prospective customers.
Defining user needs
We had our research — what next? We wanted something tangible and usable; something to keep us focused on the big picture without having to remember every bit of data. Something to bring our research to life and bring colleagues along on the journey.
That’s where these things come in:
- Discovery block diagram
- User stories / job stories
- Personas
- Red routes
- Service blueprint
As a team, we reviewed the evidence and ran a workshop where we expressed that evidence as job stories. A job story follows this format:
When I ____
I want to ___
So I can ___
Job stories help us express needs from the customer’s perspective. We wrote about 50, which we sense-checked, refined, filtered and grouped.
You might have heard of user stories — they’re a similar idea, with a different format. In our case, we thought the job story format would be more useful.
The job stories formed the backbone of a ‘persona’. A persona is a fictional person — a representation of evidence, expressed as an individual, to help stay focused on customer needs. We prioritised the job stories, re-worded them and arranged them into goals, motivations and frustrations. We gave the persona a photo, a bio and a name — Carly. Carly represents our customers — we speak of her often, and refer back to her when making decisions.
Carly will no doubt change as we learn more from our customers, and we’ll add more personas as our target audience widens and/or becomes more defined.
Bringing others along on the journey
We have a dedicated product team for probate (me, @emilyisacke, @ConstanceMantle, @lozzyrobinson). We run daily stand-ups and weekly retros to discuss progress, raise issues, plan the next week and be clear on what we’re all doing.
But it’s never just about the core team. It’s important for us to bring every member of Farewill on the journey. From customer service to marketing, from brand to partnerships — everyone has something to contribute, and everyone is vital to the product’s success.
So we over-communicated. We have weekly rituals at Farewill like ‘All hands’ (an hour on Tuesdays where everyone meets up) and ‘Friday fives’ (an end-of-week retrospective, again with everyone present) — we use these to keep our colleagues up to date with the purpose, vision and progress of the probate product, and to get their input. We run workshops not only with the core probate team but with others too, and asked for feedback regularly from the wider team.
Learning and testing
For the moment, our probate service is almost entirely non-digital, so we decided not to do any usability testing before launch. But we’ll be doing some soon (on the website), and learning as much as we can from our customers. We’ll feed this evidence and research back into the product, and keep improving and learning.
Farewill’s mission is to change the way the world deals with death. Our probate service is a hugely exciting step on that path. Now comes the most important part — providing the best possible service to families when they need it most.
Want to join us? We’re hiring!