Introduction
Bee Coin BitsWe are dedicated to improving the UX of Bitcoin so that more people can benefit from it. In our ongoing commitment to transparency and community engagement, we recently launched our product roadmap public. Now we are excited to share another work product created as part of a Summer of Bitcoin project: Bitcoin Personas.
Persona Pitfalls
Coinbits is a family-run bitcoin-only exchange. We are a small startup with a big vision: to build the first #HybridBanking platform that seamlessly combines bitcoin and fiat financial services.
Our team is primarily made up of engineers, but some of us also have product and design backgrounds. We recently decided to revamp our user personas to strengthen our foundation for continued product-market fit.
People are fictional descriptions of target users, used to focus development teams on the human needs of the people they are building products for. While they have been a mainstay of UX and innovation teams for decades, personas have developed a reputation in recent years as a high-investment project with questionable ROI. This is largely because they are often underutilized by the audience they were created for: internal engineers, designers, and executives.
Too often, beautifully designed personas are created by a UX team, presented in a meeting and promptly forgotten. And even if they aren’t, do they really provide product insights, or are they too fictional, airy and definitive?
When personas fail, chances are one or more of the following are the culprits:
- They try to be broad and inclusive rather than specific and exclusive.
- They don’t tell a story that revolves around the characters; they don’t feel like real people.
- They make extensive use of unnecessary details.
- There are too many of them, making it difficult to take them into account during the product development process.
A better approach
We believe the best way to think about personas is to think of them as summaries of user research that the entire development team has participated in. In other words, engineers, executives, and designers should really be present for a substantial portion of the user interviews. If a UX team goes out and does research and comes back with a deliverable, the rest of the team has missed the opportunity to build direct, empathetic connections with the real people who use the company’s products.
Instead, think of the work product as the interview itself and view the personas more as documentation of that work product.
Ideally, a UX owner plays the role of servant leader of a qualitative research project to drive a persona project. He or she guides conversations between engineers and users – and then immortalizes the work in a deliverable that is rich in detail and easy to surface later. In this way, personas serve the purpose of keeping research insights alive for as long as possible.
Methodology
Our product is currently only available to US customers, so our research results should be interpreted as specific to the United States. We conducted user interviews to collect qualitative data during video chat sessions. Video allowed us to see participants’ faces, body language, clothing, and physical surroundings.
We facilitated the conversation by asking open-ended questions that prompted participants to tell stories about their personal lives. While we steered the conversation back to bitcoin when it strayed too far, we also allowed for free-flowing conversation about sound money, economics, work, spirituality, values, and more.
We interviewed each of the 22 users for an hour. On our side, there were 2-4 people present and they were free to participate in the conversation.
Here’s a sample of the questions we used to move the conversation forward:
- How did you hear about us? When did you come to us?
- Why do you buy bitcoin? How do you use it? What have you used it for?
- What are your financial goals for the next 5, 10, 20 years?
- What do you think will happen to bitcoin? How will it evolve and impact the world?
- How do you get bitcoin? What apps do you use to buy and manage your bitcoin?
- Are there other bitcoiners in your social circle? What kind of people? What are the main topics you use to introduce bitcoin? What resources do you use? Why?
- If you had a magic tool that would make bitcoin better/more useful/easier, what would it do?
- What can we do for you?
The Personas
Four personas were created to represent a cross-section of our users.
Each persona contains the following elements:
- An AI generated medium shot.
- Demographics and personality descriptions
- Story: Introduction, motivations, goals and Tasks that need to be done
- Favorite brands: short content, long content, cars, finance, clothing and lifestyle.
Here are some guidelines we followed:
- Combine details from multiple user interviews rather than drawing generalizations from those interviews.
- Make sure the content is authentic and based on real user encounters. We didn’t impose artificial diversity requirements, and we didn’t go out of our way to find specific types of users that we wanted to have, or that we thought we should have.
- Tell stories that make your users memorable and likable. We should want to interact with these (fictional) people – we should think they’re at least moderately cool. If your personas aren’t likable, how hard are you really going to work to build products for them?
- Keep the number of personas low so we can easily remember them.
- Stick to an MVP. As UX practitioners, we love design and storytelling, so it’s easy to get bogged down in over-designed deliverables. Instead, send a good enough persona document and then go build some software.
You can download the final product at the Bitcoin Design Foundation website.
What’s next
People who care about bitcoin are on the cusp of creating truly user-friendly experiences. The new Apple Pay feature Tap to cash is a common example of improving UX for digital payments. It’s an indicator that we may be entering a period where the UX of payments takes a leap forward. Bitcoin certainly has a role to play here – as UX practitioners focused on bitcoin, we’re well-positioned to make an impact. We’d love it if sharing this work inspires someone to contribute to the important project of making bitcoin more user-friendly.
Want to get involved? Check out the Coinbits app. We proudly invest a huge amount of time and effort into product design and We would love to hear what you think. If this area interests you, please consider joining the community at Bitcoin Design Foundation.
By putting these research results under a CC BY-NC 4.0 With this license we want to make a small contribution to making bitcoin more user-friendly.
This project includes contributions from Tiffany Lee, Rachouan Rejeb and David Waugh.
This is a guest post by Dave Birnbaum. The opinions expressed are entirely his own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.