Coconut
- Understanding user types
Coconut was a new banking service created purely for freelancers and self-employed people, in order to help them manage their business finances.
As former freelancers themselves, the team at Coconut had ideas about what was important for freelancer banking. During the early stages of product development, they wanted to validate their views on product direction by understanding more about their potential users.
Objective
My starting point was to try and understand the business better through conducting face to face interviews with members of the Coconut team. This gave me a strong understanding of:
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Motivations in starting the business
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Commercial objectives
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Knowledge of potential users
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Competitors
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Banking landscape
Approach
Next, I worked through data Coconut had already collected through their early access sign up survey and email feedback. Through analysing this data for common themes, I got a clearer idea of what potential needs users want fulfilled using a banking service like Coconut.
I also added to this analysis by interviewing customers who were chosen for the early access programme. I used these interviews as a way to help validate some of the themes I found from the initial data, but also to gather their stories to really bring their experiences to life.
Grouping the common characteristics and themes gave me clear user personas and the visualisation of their experience through customer journey mapping. This could help the team at Coconut to understand where the opportunities and potential challenges were, to allow them to look at prioritising key product features.
Working with the rest of the Coconut team, I refined the journey map and identified additional ways to research areas that we needed more insight on.
"I'd really like someone I trust to recommend something that will be useful to me"
Through visualising the customer journey, one thing I found particularly interesting was that users were often referred to Coconut by word of mouth. The reason for this was because being able to trust a potential banking service to keep their money safe was very important to them.
Taking these insights, I identified improvements in the existing sign up experience, such as including positive showcase reviews in the press to give the Coconut product more credibility and address any skepticism about being a new banking service. I produced multi-device wireframes using Sketch and a lo-fi prototype in InVision to suggest ways to arrange information and content in line with findings.
The page structure and layout I proposed in the wireframes allows flexibility for further improvements through A/B testing the messaging and information hierarchy, with the overall goal being improving visit-to-sign-up conversion rate.
