At Coinbits, we’re 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 made our product roadmap public. Now, we're excited to share another work product which was made as a part of a Summer of Bitcoin project: Bitcoin Personas.
By offering these research results under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license, we aim to make a small contribution to bitcoin becoming more user-friendly. We also want to acknowledge the pioneering work done by others in this field, such as those who contribute to the bitcoin.design project.
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 mostly made up of engineers, but several of us also have a background in product and design. Last summer we decided to revamp our user personas in order to strengthen our foundation for continued product-market fit.
Our past experiences creating personas led us to develop strong opinions about how to create personas that are meaningful and useful. In recent years, personas have developed a reputation of being a high-investment UX project with questionable ROI. They tend to be underutilized by the audience for whom they are created – 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, fluffy, and final?
When personas fail, it is likely that one or more of these reasons is the culprit:
We believe that the best way to approach personas is to think of them as summaries of user research that the whole team participated in. In other words, the audience for your personas really should have been present during a substantial portion of the user interviews. If a UX team goes off to do research and comes back with a deliverable, the entire team will have missed out on the opportunity to build empathetic bonds with their users.
Instead, consider the work product to be the interview itself, and conceive of the personas as more akin to documentation of that work product.
Ideally, to run a persona project, a UX owner plays the role of servant leader of a qualitative research project. He or she guides conversations among engineers and users – and then immortalizes the work in a deliverable that is rich in detail and easily surfaced later. In this way, personas serve the purpose of keeping research insights alive for as long as possible.
We conducted user interviews to gather qualitative data during video chat sessions. Video allowed us to see participants’ faces, body language, clothes, and physical environment.
We facilitated the conversation by asking open-ended questions that would prompt participants to tell stories about their personal lives. Although we steered the conversation back to bitcoin when it deviated too far, we also allowed for free-flowing conversation about sound money, economics, work, spirituality, values, and more.
We interviewed each of 22 users for one hour. On our side, there were 2 to 4 people in attendance and they were free to participate in the conversation.
Here’s a sample of the question prompts we used to move the conversation forward: