Identifying the business and customer personas that will shape the new product experiences.
Our client’s ask:
Integrate 30+ marketing/vanity sites into a unified responsive site architecture to align customer, business, and advisor experiences with persona and user-driven research for delivering interaction and visual design for phased delivery.
CEO Charles Lowrey Interview, McKinsey Inside the Strategy Room Podcast
“When I first took the CEO role at the end of 2018, we recognized that Prudential was facing some significant headwinds. The company needed to become more nimble, less market sensitive, and to generate higher growth. To achieve these goals, we set out a three-part strategy. For the past two years, we’ve been just executing on that strategy.”
The Challenge
Multiple business unit stakeholders were non-aligned at kick-off with corporate divisional financial ownership and sign-off. Significant rounds of research and strategy had to be provided from detailed analysis to C-Suite summary recommendations. Vanity sites were non-unified in messaging and heavily product and service segmented while research reflected goal orientated patterns in browsing and searching.
Transformational Goals
The company had a vision in 2018 to be more agile while providing greater access to their customers and employee tools. They had three parts of focus within their strategy, the second was where we helped support their transformation:
Financial: Produce a higher consistency of earnings relative to their financial guidance.
Transformation Initiative itself: This had three parts:
Reviewing and refining product strategy and product mix
Developing and executing a cost savings program, offsetting some costs of low interest rates
Conducting a strategic review of our businesses
Capital stewardship: balance of investing in the businesses with returning shareholders capital
What’s at stake.
Prudential is one of the largest financial institution in the United States. The total revenues of Prudential Financial has increased with fluctuations between 2006 and 2021. The total revenues of the U.S. insurance and financial services company amounted to approximately 70.9 billion U.S. dollars in 2021.
Billions Managed
The Approach.
Stakeholder Interviews
Assess Benchmarks of Project Success
Conduct Quantitative, Qualitative Persona Research
Develop Personas
Content Audit
Marketing and Site Metrics Evaluation
Card Sort Prep, Polling
Conduct Quantitative Architecture Research (Open Card Sort)
Card Sort Quantitative Analysis
Propose Site Map (Preliminary IA) with business stakeholder socialization
Wireframe Prototype User Testing and Analysis
Update Wireframes with stakeholder alignment
Navigation/Wireframe Modeling with stakeholder feedback
Validate the Site Architecture (Closed Card Sort)
Finalize Site Map
Creative Design Content Architecture Wireframes, Stakeholder socialization
Navigation/Wireframe Modeling with stakeholder feedback
Interaction Patterns/Guidelines
Visual Design Frameworks
What is a Digital Experience Persona?
A Persona is a representation of a segment or grouping of users who share highly similar traits as they pertain to digital experience. In a user-centered design process, Personas help to create empathy and imagine experiences from the point of view of idividuals other than oneself. Personas are synthesized by user experience subject matter experts from data points collected from ethnographic, market and other areas of research. Each Persona is expressed as a fictional character with a particular demographic, behavioral, motivational and psychographic profile.
How are Digital Experience Personas Used?
The most fundamental benefit of developing Personas is arriving at a shared understanding of key user segments. These realistic representations provide insights into user goals, expectations and behaviors and help shape the design of user experiences. Designers gain insight into how to structure page layouts and navigation schemes, developers can make informed decisions about the functionality of components and copywriters can ensure that content is appropriate for different audiences.
How do Personas help execute the Intelligent Solver strategy?
The Intelligent Solver concept definition established five Archetypes by grouping all constituents according to their principle relationship to Prudential and one another. Personas take the strategy to the next level of detail by creating realistic represenations of real users. These reperesentations provide key insights that will help:
UX - Direct the design of features and functionalities
Content Migration - Tailor the content architecture
Signature Experiences - Support process design
The Intelligent Solver Relationship Model
The Intelligent Solver concept is brought to life through an evolved relationship model. This model provides a holistic vision of how Prudential interacts with its constituents.
In the Evolved Relationship Model, Individuals are in the center and the relationship between them, their Intermediaries, Institutions or Influencers is enabled by Prudential that provides a platform for more seamless interactions.
CEO Charles Lowrey Interview, McKinsey Inside the Strategy Room Podcast
“The biggest challenge we faced (2018) is that we weren’t doing badly… How do you explain to stakeholders, especially employees, the necessity and in fact the urgency to change? First, you always look to your customers. Customers want a seamless experience, with speed and convenience of both tech and human touch. And the industry itself is changing. If you look at our competitors, they are seeing consolidation and activism. So we needed to change”
Archetypes Identified
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INDIVIDUAL
The end purchasers or users of Prudential products and services, who ultimately invest and benefit throughout their lifetime.
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INSTITUTION
An institutional client who makes decisions on behalf of their employer, union, or affiliated institution that benefit an organization of individuals.
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INTERMEDIARY
Prudential’s referrer of individual and institutional clients, for whom they manage investments and provide consulting and advising services.
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INFLUENCER
An opinion shaper who can directly or indirectly impact the actions, behaviors and decisions of individuals, institutional clients and intermediaries.
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PRUDENTIAL
The prospective, current and former associates who support products, services or the enterprise itself.
User Archetypes, Personas and Roles
Constituents are grouped into Archetypes according to similarities in their relationship to Prudential and one another. These Archetypes represent the most fundamental classification of constituents. From there, each Archetype is then further segmented into Personas according to commonalities in demographics, psychographics and behavior. Personas are specific enough to inform content strategy and user experience design. And finally, within each Persona, users are segmented into common Roles according to factors such as job title or relationship to Prudential products.
- P. Mouser, Account/Project Manager, Accenture
“I was extremely impressed with Josh's work on the research in particular. He was able to use hundreds of existing research documents to get a firm foundation in this client's business, and he also developed a strong working relationship with the client's internal research team. This earned the clients trust and buy in for conducting additional research activities.”
Personas
View a sample of the persona work
Phase 1 Prioritization Methodology
A subset of the Digital Working Team, with an emphasis on Phase 1, reviewed the Digital Experience Personas and evaluated them using the matrix above. The prioritization exercise was conducted to choose which Personas present the greatest opportunity for delivering on the promise of the Intelligent Solver strategy within the framework of Phase 1. The matrix helped stakeholders identify how Personas are aligned to the following areas of emphasis:
Digital
User Types
Business Units
Authentication States
Business Cases
Phase 1 Platforms
Brand Segments
PRIORITIZATION OF PERSONAS
Persona Explanation
Persona Prioritized
Prioritized Personas
- P. Mouser, Account/Project Manager, Accenture
“Josh brought a tremendous amount of expertise to this project. The client was attempting to overhaul and consolidate existing web properties for five businesses. This meant coming up with logical navigation schemas that were both user centric but also supported the nuanced differences in information between the businesses.
Josh was able to structure a plan for creating a new R1 architecture through focused user research and collaborative workshops with the client. This plan was thorough and thoughtfully sequenced.”