Trusted House Sitters - Interacting Personas
Trusted house-sitters personas where outdated and not reflecting real users, so they were looking to update their set of interacting personas and to document their journeys from the homepage to the final booking.
They also wanted to boost the sign up flow of pet owners and validate three business assumptions.
For this project I collaborated closely with the UX Designer and the Project Manager.
Understand.
I read the existing marketing documentation and discussed the personas with customer care representatives to understand previous work.
All five personas were used loosely to design previous marketing features; pleasing everyone a little but never one type of persona. This method produced mediocre products with a vague design focus.
To understand users better, I had to interview both set of personas, pet owners and sitters. Certain types of personas had similar goals, and they needed merging, while there were untapped areas of inclusion missing.
What do pet owners need to gain more trust to sign up?
What are pet sitters prepared to do to inspire that trust beyond reviews?
How can we improve the search results for both?
Create.
I designed the research plan to inform personas on zero research budget. Twelve pet sitter and owner participants between 25–66 years across UK, USA and Australia were invited through Facebook in a remote video call to discuss their goals and behaviour when searching for a house or a sitter.
We learned that sitters are looking for clarity in communication. While pet owners look for people their age who are verified, have good reviews and a caring personality.
“It is basically like a dating app” The pet sitter needs the owner to set clear expectations and provide instructions with the feeding schedule of the pet.
I presented the interview findings in a collaborative stakeholder workshop. Together we clustered user quotes and observations to inform a new set of personas based on behaviours, tasks and goals. After that, sub-groups of the team selected a persona of their liking and created an empathy map. The map allowed each persona's (owners and sitters) story to emerge through user case scenarios and journey when searching and booking the next pet sit. Designing parallel user journeys helped us understand their interaction and inform the design.
Deliver.
The deliverables of this informative research included a user research report answering the research questions through four main themes of findings on trust, communication, pet sitter and owner goals and behaviour. I worked collaboratively with the stakeholder team to
Identify the primary and secondary personas to inform later designs,
Update five personas and introduce a provisional persona on accessibility.
Create scenarios
Map the owner and sitter journeys in parallel interactions
Recommend further user research to
fill gaps,
test assumptions and
design for accessibility and inclusion for global communities and shared-economies.