How does income affect persona creation for e-commerce site

Question

I'm creating personas for our ecommerce site. There are two candidates; the only differences are their age and income. Will I need two personas to capture both? I am trying to see if there is any website behavior difference that can stem from their income and age differences.

I can think of the following:

Persona A (less income, 18-35 yrs old):

• more interested in Credit Card application/payment options;
• more interested in social media
• spend more time on mobile

Persona B (more income, 35-50 yrs old):

• less interested in Credit Card application/payment options;
• spend less time on social media
• spend not as much time on mobile

I cannot see how these differences might affect the UX design. E.g., we cannot just offer CC applications for some users, but not others. We cannot just provide social media content extracts for some users, but not others.

Though they have differences, I fail to see how that would affect design decisions.

Am I understanding personas properly?

Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

based on what you’ve described about the personas it seems that you equated younger audience with less income and older audience with more income. This may not be necessarily true.

For an application it’s common to have 3 to 5 personas (not more and not less) to capture the bulk of the audience using your application.

A lower income person may have access to a more dated device, or slower network/ intermittent network connections. if your e-commerce site needs to cater to this group of audience the data management and site speed must be well managed.

An older person may require bigger font size, they may be less receptive to clutter on the screen or their choice of words may differ from a younger person (eg use of slangs, acronyms and colloquial vocabulary.

So actually to define persona, you have to have access to the demographics of your existing users on the e-commerce site to group people with the same demographics or usage patterns together. If your e-commerce site is new or has few users, then you need to do some brainstorming and user research to determine who are the intended users and how their demographics and user behaviour would be like.

Hope this helps to explain!