Persona creation and design for mortgage experience
The background:
• When our 3 mortgage agile teams were formed they were given personas created by a 3rd party vendor
• The personas were out of the box and not based on research, formed mostly out of assumptions
The challenge:
• We needed more customer perspective built into our personas
• Our personas needed to represent various customers obtaining / servicing a mortgage
• We needed our entire team and stake holders to be invested in the personas so that UX wasn’t the only team using them
The plan:
• We set up a 3 day in person customer / team workshop
• We recruited customers who had obtained a mortgage within the last 12 months with varying ages and finances
• We included a wide range of team members across the agile teams as well as stake holders
Picture of workshop with teammates and customers
The execution:
• We took our teams interviews and journey maps of the customers and spent 2 weeks synthesizing the information (myself, another UX Architect and a UX researcher)
• We created 3 personas out of the 5 customers we interviewed and their experience
The investor persona was created for the customer who is making their home-buying decision based on an investment. These personas are those purchasing homes that they are looking to get a return on, a rental property, an Air bnb property, or a property they are both living in and running their business out of.
The life event persona was created for a customer who's motivated to buy a home because of a life event, such as: having a baby, getting married, going through a divorce, down-sizing as children leave the home, or having an elderly parent move in.
The lifestyle persona was created for a customer who's motivation is driven by their desire to maintain or establish a certain lifestyle. Examples of this would be a customer buying a home an area to expose themselves to nightlife and restaurants, a home that is low cost so that they may travel more, or a home that is in an affluent area to 'keep up with the Jone's'.
The artifacts:
• I created an internal website with the personas and journey maps so that our teams could access them at any time
• I created card board cut outs to send to our different office locations where team members were located
• I set up a “champion committee” (made up of team members from the workshop + executive leadership) to meet regularly on the personas to keep them invested and help the personas evolve
The current state:
• The personas have been successful across several teams in story writing and determining strategy for products
• We continue to meet with our champion team on a quarterly basis to encourage use of the personas and identify opportunities for them
• We’ve had 6 virtual workshops since their creation where we’ve presented the personas and used them to approach our customers challenges
