How generative research about personal finances can help design your bank’s value proposition
Research approach
When we think about digital products, the main levels are the users, the product and the business. It means that users interact with a product that gives them value — hopefully. :)
Organisations tend to concentrate mostly on the first two components which means the interaction of the user and the product. This is inevitably essential, but this model has two limitations.
One of them is that we assume that our solution is valid and the iterative correction of its usability will lead to a better product. This is true in case we have a deep knowledge of the original problem. The exploration of the problem is that we don’t consider the product research level.
The other limitation is that the business side is missing but research can provide valuable insights for the business as well.
We wanted to take research to the next step in order to achieve to work in the whole spectrum on the user-product-business levels.
Job-to-be-done model
Why is it crucial to research customers’ needs and way of thinking to create a bank’s value proposition?
Typically, financial institutes build their hypothesis thinking their solution is correct, e.g. if the customer needs money, they’ll get a personal loan.
But in the real world the thinking behind a decision is way more complex. It may turn out that a completely different solution is needed.
This is what fin-tech companies are aware of, they truly understand customer jobs and they create a different solution for their problems than incumbent banks.
Example
JTBD: Gotta pay deposit urgently to rent an apartment.
Banks’ solution: personal loan which comes with high interest rate, hard to understand banking terms, lots of paperwork.
Fin-tech solution: Fronted, an alternative to large upfront deposits that comes with low interest rate, more manageable platform and comprehensible process.
Our goal was to better understand what kind of problems people have with money — regardless of banking solutions, and to gain a comprehensive picture of what their goals, difficulties and opportunities are. We needed generative research to get a deep understanding of customers’ real problems.
What’s worth mentioning regarding this model is that fin-tech companies often answer to one job-to-be-done while banks have to give a solution to tons of them.
Phase 1: Baseline research
This research was created to support the merge of three traditional Hungarian banks in redefining themselves.
The goal of the baseline research was to identify the main topics that we should dig deeper in the deep interviews later on to discover the complex picture.
The baseline included the following steps:
- Collecting the existing qualitative research materials from the three banks on personal finances
- Desk research to review the publicly available findings of personal finances
- Guerilla interviews (40) with friends and family on personal finances with the involvement of the broader team (product owners, designers, developers) to get a direction on recruitment and customer segmentation, furthermore defining further research questions
Phase 2: Deep dive on personal finances
The goal of this phase was to understand the main goals and motivations of customers around their personal finances.
We defined the following steps in order to achieve that goal:
- Who we want to speak with: the segments for the recruitment
- What we want to understand: the questions we want to explore=interview script
- Recruitment: screener and selection
- Qualitative deep interviews (55)
Phase 3: Synthesis of the learnings and creating research outputs
UX Research may result in multiple outputs and it’s often easy to end up with a static report. Our goal was to reach a more extensive engagement throughout the organisation, so the stakeholders and the design team could better empathise with the customers.
From Synthesis Monster to Public Insight Center
We started to brainstorm and collect overall findings on a Miro board that soon became quite incomprehensible for those who hadn’t participated in the research process. The original purpose of this board was to use it as a notebook or exercise book.
Once we had a clear picture of the insights, we’ve created an insight center to provide an easy-to-digest and fun format that is accessible for everyone within the company. We also created a written document in parallel in case anyone would like to have a deeper understanding of the insights.
Visibility
To make research more visible within the organisation, we‘ve opened a Slack channel called ‘Research nuggets’ which is used in the long run to drop research results in short summaries. The purpose of this channel is to have an open conversation about certain topics and involve the broader team in the research processes.
Workshop
Another way to involve the team in the research was to hold a customer journey workshop where we introduced different customer segments and defined their actions, feelings, pains, etc. together. This exercise helped other team members to step into the shoes of different customer segments and to think with their minds.
Research showroom
We also think that our message can be truly understood if we find another way to convey the insights instead of a frontal presentation. We’ve created a research showroom with deep-dive user stories and it was a great success in the team.
What happened is that we chose 20 random participants from the generative research in 4 age categories and introduced them to the broader team. Each story included the background of the person, the answers on what money means to them and what shaped their relationship to money. Besides these questions, we highlighted one detail which makes their story remarkable.
A story could be remarkable e.g. if someone had a unique technique for money tracking or had an experience with financial products that taught them something, etc.
The main goal was with these deep-dive stories to bring customers closer to the stakeholders, developers and the design team by proving that in finances demographics are not necessarily relevant but the behaviour and attitude are the key components in creating financial products and services that customers truly need.
Value proposition
We’ve found that the format of the value proposition canvas is the one that makes it possible to help high-level leaders understand and utilise the research findings directly.
The canvas has two parts: the right side shows the customer segment where the gains, pains and jobs of the customer can be listed and the left side shows the answers to the customer profile — gain creators, products and services and the pain relievers.
What we’ve done is that we’ve created the customer profile — right side of the canvas — for each research participant — listing their gains, pains and customer jobs and facilitated a workshop with the value proposition team where we asked the leaders to think about the gain creators, pain relievers, products&services and fill out the left-side of the canvas with their post-its.
Once the post-its were synthesised, the high-level value proposition was created.
Main lessons
This whole research took altogether almost half a year and we definitely realised a few things that we would do differently next time.
What we would focus on next time is to…
- work with a heterogeneous participant pool to consider some unique segments, e.g. rural people.
- avoid mixing up quantitative and qualitative data, meaning: there’s a tendency to concentrate on quantifiable findings rather than qualitative in the research.
- try to work in researcher pairs because conducting that amount of interviews and processing the data alone are overwhelming. Furthermore, it’s more beneficial for the team and in the creation of the insights to have more perspectives.
I hope you found interesting and valuable thoughts in the article. Please, feel free to give any comments on it. I’m also happy to answer any questions if needed.
