MyCircle: User Persona

PROJECT BRIEF

This User Persona describes the typical customer of MyCircle, a highly secure social media platform that connects senior and elderly users with dispersed families, and enables them to gift each other money.

Platform & Device

• Platform: MyCircle (social media app)
• Device Type: Smartphone (text magnifier is commonly used)

Research Goal

The goal of this research is to identify factors responsible for a substantial decline in user-engagement after the first week of use.

Secondary Goals:

1. Understand what drives elderly users to adopt a social media app
2. Identify the friction points that hinders usage of tools and completion of tasks
3. Find areas where users can be strategically prompted to share the app with their network and family
4. Improve the app's microcopy
5. Simply the app's financial integrations to boost usage of gifting functionality

Research Method

The following methods were used to document how customers succeed, fail, and freeze, when using the MyCircle app:

1. Family-led video conference sessions
2. Retirement community workshops conducted on-location
3. Analysis of in-app live chat conversations

During these sessions, data is collected via:

• Questionnaire
• Observation of user completing a series of tasks (e.g. view a member's profile, send a monetary gift)
• Verbal interview, recorded and transcribed

Challenges

Two main difficulties arose during this research:

1. Users are used to different terminology to what is currently used
2. Users are unfamiliar with basic smartphone operation, so their sentiment towards the app may be caused by lack of technical literacy

Conclusions

• Data is conclusive enough to inform feature prioritization in the MyCircle app navigation menu, and simplification of the layout.
• 94% of users struggle with authentication, forgotten passwords, lack of intuition on services like 2FA, magic links, etc.
• A need has been identified for a tool that enables trusted and verified family members to manage the user's app remotely (like password resets, authenticating payment platforms, etc).