70% of users are members of the Baby Boom & World War II generations.

69% identified as female.

76% continue to purchase checks from the same company as their previous order.

Accuracy of the information printed on the check is the single most important aspect of a successful check purchase.

In general, senior users are more likely to have issues or problems related to: vision, dexterity, hearing, memory, information processing, and decision making.

Given the physical and cognitive issues that arise with advancing age, and in comparison to younger users, senior users on the web:

Become fatigued and discouraged more easily

Are slower and more methodical

Give up more often

Are more hesitant to explore or try new things

Are less likely to look for or ask for help when struggling

Are more likely to blame themselves instead of the design

Understanding that market research isn't user research, I did gather

some basic demographic intelligence, uncovered a few useful behaviors, and achieved a better understanding of the business by reviewing the recent U.S. Personal Check Purchase Market Survey which was prepared for the company by an outside marketing consultancy firm.

I was able to validate the older and female demographic as well as the higher rate of re-orders by auditing numerous telephone orders for personal checks at the company's call center. It was striking to witness  the volume of users that still use the telephone to order the things they need and validated my research findings that older users' preferred method of communication when they need help is over the phone.

Amy Schade's article, Designing for Five Types of E-Commerce Shoppers, was extremely helpful in identifying the motivations and the needs of the specific types of e-commerce shoppers. Armed with this information, I was able to help define and focus our users into two specific types of shoppers: the product focused shopper and the bargain hunter.  Knowledge of their specific habits and motivations was also instrumental in the development of personas and scenarios.

The product-focused shopper type has real application to our users because personal checks can be one of those annoying expendable products that people are always running out of like the 'classics' such as milk and toilet paper. Thus product focused shoppers are replacing an item they already have, know exactly what they want, need to locate it quickly, and buy it. They are coming to our site with a real sense of purpose and aren't there to browse or conduct research.

A substantial portion of our users are bargain hunters motivated by finding the best deal on personal checks and getting that good deal trumps any measure of brand loyalty. These users need to locate deals quickly, have discounted or sales prices aligned next to full price items, and the savings must be clearly highlighted in order to entice them into a purchase.

I took a deep dive with my research of senior users with Nielsen Norman Group's Senior Citizens on the Web (2nd Edition). This evidence-based research report and its design guidelines proved to be an invaluable resource for developing a deeper understanding and sensitivity to the specific behaviors, needs, and challenges of this rapidly growing group of users.

One of the most important outcomes of my user research was the realization that just one component of your users, in this case, it was their age, can have an enormous impact on the success or failure of their experience with your design and validates the critical role that thorough user research plays in the design process.

I researched the reviews and complaints about the company online at the Better Business Bureau to uncover any problems with the current website experience. What echoed throughout the reviews was that many users were particularly upset by the current practice of assumptively adding a third-party's check fraud protection to their check orders in the shopping cart.

Although users can eliminate the item from their shopping carts what really made the experience so frustrating was that they must select 'No - I do not want to be protected', not once, but twice!

In our research, teams that utilize robust personas find they create better designs, especially for things they wouldn’t normally use themselves.

- Jared Spool

I created and presented a number of personas and scenarios to the product team to: summarize my user research, remind everyone who are users are (real people), and to focus my design efforts on solving our users' specific problems.

These personas and scenarios included:

As you can see, I created specific users and scenarios that reflect the real-world experiences of our users.

In the case of the last scenario, it is encountered quite often by some of our users and was an ongoing issue that we wanted to address. Contributing factors that created this scenario and made it tricky to solve are the facts that:

As was expected for such an important piece of real estate, no other page amassed as much discussion, iteration, and revision than the Home page. Everyone, it seemed, from site optimization, marketing, licensing, creative, SEO, and even our Senior Vice President, weighed in on the design which made for a lot of 'cooks in the kitchen.'

Despite the challenge of balancing all these opinions and priorities, at the end of the day, the Home page was greatly improved in terms of:

I knew we were going to be asking users, especially new users, to work with forms to complete the task of placing a new check order. So it only made sense to build a prototype capable of creating and handling an interactive form. A tool like InVision just doesn't have such capability. All of which suggested I give Axure RP another try.

I won't bore you with a long story of my previous experience building a basic prototype in Axure. Let's just say I didn't enjoy it. Like really didn't enjoy it.

In trying Axure again, and for whatever the reasons may be, everything suddenly fell into place. It was exciting and actually quite fun to see static mockup pages blossom into a functional design, albeit a prototype. Working in Axure was instrumental in allowing me the opportunity to create and test some critical interactions such as applying and removing offer codes, additional product views, and most of all, error messaging. Given that older users are so prone to making typographical errors, I was really pleased to be able to test our users' ability to correct their mistakes.

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