Key Summary
The client is one of the leading asset management companies in Thailand. Their mutual fund website did not have a clearly defined understanding of its target investors and there was no structured view of who the investors were, how they differed, and what influenced their decisions.
Without clarity about who are the target users, product decisions risked being based on assumptions rather than real investor behavior.
Strategic Approach
To better understand the target users, I led a qualitative research to develop investor personas. I defined the research objectives, recruited participants with different investment experiences, and conducted in-depth interviews to understand their motivations, goals, and decision-making patterns on finding mutual funds to invest.
The insights were then synthesized into investor personas. These personas captured key behavioral differences and were shared with stakeholders to support alignment across design teams as the goal was not just to create personas, but to provide a clear foundation for website direction and prioritization.
Business Impact
The personas gave the team a clearer understanding of who they were designing and building for, rather than relying on assumption-based decisions.
Overall, it helped aligning product, design, and business teams around real investor needs, and can used as a shared reference point for roadmap and strategy discussions.
Key Takeaway
This project showed that strong product design direction starts with a clear understanding of real user behavior, not assumptions.
To make the persona remain valuable, it should evolve alongside market conditions and be embedded into product roadmapping and growth discussions.
Full Case Study
Still curious about this project? Use this section below to see my complete end-to-end thinking process
Project Background
Our client approached us with a website redesign project. The function of the current website is to provides information about mutual funds they are selling.
The client came to us as they wanted to improve their website to be more updated as the current website design doesn’t provide an up-to-date look compared to their competitors.
Client’s business goal was to improve the website to be up-to-date as an official financial source of information, the website should look secure and well-maintained. However, the client team didn’t know where to start and they didn’t have any information about their website users before.
Note: There are so many way to do research to improve the experience but since we didn’t know our users before - who we’re designing the website for. We decided to conduct a research to understand the mutual fund website visitors first.
Overview Research Process
Align
Align project objectives and the Proto-Persona to come up with the research plan
Plan
Recruit research participants and create a research protocol
Gather
Capture data by conducting in-depth Interviews
Analyze
Summarize data and moderate an ideation workshop
Apply
Develop deliverables: Present findings and recommendation to stakeholders
Align
Hypothesis
There are many types of investors, ranging from beginners and those investing solely for tax savings, to experienced investors.
These different user groups require different types of information.
Hypotheses of the user persona “Proto-Persona” are used prior to the development of verified ones, serving as a baseline to acknowledge the diversity of potential user types.
Different factors that influence investor behavior
Different degree of experience on Mutual Fund
Note: This hypotheses of the persona were also utilized for the recruitment process, such as factors that influence investor behavior (Different factors that influence investor behavior, Different degree of experience on Mutual Fund, etc.)
Research Objectives
To uncover user goals and motivations, and to understand current behaviors and decision-making processes when using online channels to research mutual funds.
By understanding these user stories, we can dig deeper into their motivations. These insights are key to designing an experience that encourages users to adopt our product.
Plan
Participant Recruitment Process
We designed a recruitment screener to filter respondents and identify behavioral patterns.
Based on the results, we selected participants and clustered them into 4 groups:
- Novice Users: Individuals who are new to all types of investment.
- Tax Savers: Users with intermediate knowledge who invest primarily for tax benefits.
- Expert Investors: Users with high knowledge and extensive experience in mutual funds.
- Knowledgeable Newcomers: Users with strong theoretical knowledge but low years of experience in mutual funds.
We used Google Sheets to organize screener responses and identify distinct user segments.
Gather
In-depth Interview
We conducted in-depth interviews to understand the end-to-end user journey. Our goal was to uncover how users find mutual fund data, what drives their preference for specific platforms, and their key motivations, pains, and gains throughout the process.
Facilitating an in-person interview to build deeper rapport.
Analyze
Data Summarization
Affinity mapping is used to analyze the findings from the interview as we want to find similarity in user’s goal, pain points, gain points to create user personas.
3 Investor Personas
From the interview data, it showed 3 different kinds of user pattern that can be grouped into 3 personas.
These different behavioral patterns are from How long have they started invest in mutual funds, How much experience do they have, How much and what kind of information they want to get before making a decision on purchasing each fund.
User Personas and their Journey Maps of exploring mutual funds before deciding to invest
Apply
Personas and Journey Maps help the designers to understand who they are designing the website for and understand current user journeys of finding information about the mutual fund - these allow the team to easily identify user motivation, gain points, and pain points.
With user personas, the working teams will have a shared understanding of who the users are, empathize with and prioritize user needs effectively.
Ideation Workshop
We had an ideation workshop to brainstorm potential features that different kinds of user might need when they use official mutual fund websites
Example of the Features for the New Investor Persona
Key Term Explanation
Offer accessible tooltips or a chat feature to provide clear definitions for industry-specific jargon and key financial terms to support their investment decision-making process
