2023  ✦  Service Design

Delphia aims to lower the barrier to premium investing by giving everyday investors access to actively managed, AI-driven investment strategies. Since the launch of its invest product in 2015, Delphia's product messaging and brand have emphasized premium investing. However, the company's business goal is to drive data acquisition from its users and incentivize them to contribute their data. Delphia's vision and business goal is data-first, with the aim of creating a richer data profile for the user and a persona.

Why a persona?

User personas are archetypical users whose goals and characteristics represent the needs of a larger group of users. A persona includes behaviour patterns, motivations, attitudes, pain points, and needs, as well as the environment in which the persona operates.

Personas help organizations build empathy and identify with the user they’re building for. We are able to ground our design decisions and product direction in real, observable user data.

Product Design Lead

Client: Delphia

Project Type: Service Design

Role: Senior Product Designer, Design Lead

Duration: 12 weeks

Our research process:

Our research focus was to gain more understanding about behaviours and attitudes of different user segments that we hypothesized had a greater affinity for our product. The main topics of interest were our users’ previous investment experience and their future financial goals, their general knowledge of data, and their perceived value of data.

• Stakeholder workshop
  
• 21 user interviews
  
• Transcript analysis
  
• Affinity mapping of quotes
  
• Proto-persona development
  
• Statistical analysis
  
• Persona development

How our users understood their data

• Users’ didn’t consider their data as a source of potential wealth generation.
  
• Users perceive data as potentially valuable, although they may not be aware of how to monetize it.
  
• Users who have tried to monetize their data have found it to be cumbersome and not worthwhile.
  
• Users were motivated to access monetary rewards for their data.

What motivated our users

• Users were motivated to improve their investment returns while deferring the work of stock picking to a Do-It-For-Me (DIFM) investment app.
  
• Our users were interested in capitalizing on the potential value of their data.
  
• Interested in creative ways to generate wealth given their existing means.

Delphia's True Fan

These findings led our team to determine that the True Fan was an:

Engaged → The user segment that corresponded to our “True Fan” had a high average number of data contributions and checked the Delphia app daily.

Data-literate → Interviews indicated that our “True Fans” were aware of the data they generated, how it was used, and its potential value.

Young professional → The statistical analysis of our user base indicated that our True Fan users were employed or students, between 24-39 years old.

Comprehensive investment experience → The True Fan user segment self-reported to have Good - Extensive investment experience. Our interviews indicated a high degree of investment knowledge.

Defining a clear value proposition

Our research showed that new users of Delphia's mobile app were not motivated to contribute their data because they didn't understand how it could generate wealth. They were unclear about Delphia's value proposition.

To better serve our True Fan users, I developed a clear value proposition for each product area of the mobile experience that would guide product direction moving forward.

Legibility and comprehension

• I conducted value proposition testing through a card sorting exercise with 10 users to validate legibility and comprehension.
  
• These tests helped me gain a deeper understanding of users' mental model of Delphia's ecosystem and their initial interpretation of Delphia's messaging.
  
• Based on the findings of the message testing exercise, we collaborated with the creative team to revise Delphia's brand guidelines.

How we communicate our brand

To highlight the data-first narrative in the True Fan persona's experience, I collaborated closely with the creative team to share updated brand guidelines with the organization.

These guidelines established clear messaging direction and copy guidelines for product teams, enabling them to effectively communicate Delphia's product value to our users.