In Product Design, ease doesn't come easy.
Like a great song that stirs your emotions, good design feels exciting, graceful and essential. You experience ease of use like a Bach melody butterflying through keys. But to the creator there is labor and madness behind the scenes. More about that. In the end, their products are dressed up to appear easy, fun and flow effortlessly. But the ease doesn't come easy. There is rigor and method to the madness.
The method begins with an essential question: who is it for? — who are the people that a creation must attract and serve? By understanding the full range of humans, we learn their motivations, daily habits, needs, pain points, capabilities, demographics, cultural backgrounds, and do so in order to formulate something that will convert them to happy campers—to become more productive, loyal customers.
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Research answers who, and what we find helps define the most important driving force behind a product design — the target users—or, in UX research parlance, personas.
In a modest UX organization, doing research is often one of many hats a fullstack designer must wear. If not, they will receive receive the research by proxy as input from their research partners.
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Product = Customer x Business x Technology
These are the triple pillars of a successful product/solution. Marty Cagan covers it succinctly in his article
What is a product?
In the above equation, research answers who and results in a picture of the
Customer. But the customer isn't typically described in a simple sentence, rather a multitude of multi-dimensional profiles.
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I joined the Rambus Payments Group in 2018 to find the beginnings of a business model, a technical solution and a UI borrowed from other solutions — an ecommerce checkout flow built for an Australian ecommerce conglomerate.
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The UI I found in place lept from our security technology, direct to consumer table stakes - a digital wallet with components 'borrowed' from PayPal, Google Checkout and the typical ecom models.
I asked the question: Did our solution aim to satisfy only—or even primarily—consumers? Answer: No. In fact, the consumer user was the furthest removed from our solution.
Here it was important to map out primary, secondary and tertiary personas:
Primary target users:
Ecommerce Conglomerate: An executively managed multi-merchant conglomerate of diverse Web stores and apps.
Target users: Executive staff, Marketing Pros, Project managers, Financial Analysts
Merchants: Independently operated consumer stores with various Web and mobile checkout
Sub-cats: Business and marketing users, Support Reps, technical integrators
Secondary users:
Consumers: Consumer shoppers
Target users: Unregistered users, new users, loyal users, sometimes users, abandoned users
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Missing was a 360 degree view of the ALL the users this solution needed to serve to deliver the following:
- Platform: scale to a serve range and volume of customers in a product/solution
- Try-before-you-buy
- White-labeling: rebrand, repackage and customize the look-and-feel
- User Experience flow adjusment
- Documentation and support forums
- A ticketing system
- A method for content management
Who would ever imagine that a designer needs to address everyone of these areas and where to begin? The target users.
In an enterprise solution the business users, merchants and the technology integrators that need to deploy and manage it easily across hundreds of merchants operating inside a large marketplace matter even more to our solution. We empower them with a balance of flexible tools with gaurdrails, so they can in-turn serve their consumers.
Primary target users:
Conglomerate:
Sub-cats: Executive staff, Marketing Pros, Project managers, Financial Analysts
Merchants
Sub-cats: Business and marketing users, Support Reps, technical integrators
Secondary users: Consumers
Sub-cats: Unregistered users, new users, abandoned users, sometimes users, loyal users
As a result of aiming to serve only one, single consituent, the solution was monolithic, inflexible and unappealing to the many personas that needed to deploy it, market it, customize it, get it adopted by consumers to grow as a platform that served their consumers, their business and our business.
The solution needed to address at least 3 broad categories of users:
1- Business users (business managers, marketing professionals and customer support)
2- Integration teams (developers and designers)
3- Consumers (the vast, diverse and fickle sea of shoppers)
for a consumer digital wallet that would help just one ecommerce conglomerate and its merchants hopefully improve security and convenience for online checkout in Australia.
Over the course of the development, our ecommerce customer increasingly asked: how will the merchant brands make the checkout experience serve their customer needs and their brands?
The team had put effort into developing
In 2016 Rambus—a public semi-conductor company—acquired Rotterdam-based software payments group Bell ID. Its Token Service Provider (TSP) provided banks, credit card issuers and online merchants with an API to tokenize user credentials and payment card details. In 2018 we set out to extend the use cases for TSP into a new domain: cryptocurrency.
We researched the crypto market to identify painpoints and brainstorm future directions. In the 10 years since inception Bitcoin, fast-followed by a myriad of altcoins, had seen astronomical growth but also wild volatility followed by trepidation from investors spooked by hacked exchanges, vanishing millions and black market activity. Crypto was still a shadowy realm.
Our research led us to predict that the two most important measures to accelerate productive, crypto market growth would be:
- Innovate crypto to become a better alternative to fiat currencies
- Add increased security infrastructure to improve trust in safe, convenient transactions
We decided to use our expertise in security infrastructure to support a new crop of Fintech ventures building innovative brands for millienials fed up with old-world banking.
