Think of a user persona as creating a character for your product. It’s like imagining an ideal friend who is the perfect user of your product.

Understanding your users’ demands and behaviors can change the way you build your product, making it more successful and interesting. This insight can shape your product strategy, making it more successful and engaging.

What is a user persona?

A user persona is a semi-fictional figure obtained from research and actual data about your current or potential customer, it represents a sizable portion of a product’s target market.

User personas help in crafting a product vision and place a sympathetic focus on the user by reducing this data into relatable and humanized profiles for design, development, and marketing teams.

Even 81% of customers want brands to get to know them and understand when to approach them, and this can only be made possible with a well-crafted user persona.

What should a user persona consist of?

The short answer to the question of what to include in a persona is whatever you find useful to your business. For example, if you’re creating a marketing persona for a tech company, you can include details like their level of tech device skill—information that is relevant to the way you design an interface but if you’re a shoe company trying to stay up to date with kids’ fashion, a tech skill is not needed.

Here is what every persona should include;

1. Name: Make it realistic, you could take it  from an actual customer, or it could be a descriptive handle like “Lynda the Baker”

2. Photo: It helps to put a face to a name

3. Personal quote/motto: Just like a photo, this helps flesh out the persona to make it seem more real.

4. Bio: Write a brief biography to establish the person’s relatability- How did they spend their childhood years? Why did they decide on their present position? What do they do when they have free time? These details can eventually affect strategic decisions.

5. Demographics: Age, gender, income, location, or any other characteristics that are relevant to your industry- Considering the financial and business ramifications, 

6. Personality Traits: Personality traits are important in creating personas, you need to choose them thoughtfully to reflect user behavior accurately. Users with short attention spans prefer quick-loading websites, while cautious individuals tend to compare different options before making a purchase. 

7. Motivations: Motivations help to clarify a customer’s decision-making process and determine whether a customer is more likely to buy a product that benefits their personal or professional life, based on what motivates them most.

8. Goals and frustrations: Goals and frustrations should align with your product focus. For a tech company, emphasize tools and technology-related objectives, and for a lifestyle brand, focus on broader life and career aspirations.

9. Preferred brands and influencers: A person’s favorite brands and influencers can provide insight into their preferences and decisions. Analyze these to see if similar marketing strategies could work for your brand.

Some companies also find the following aspects helpful when developing a persona:

• Preferred social media channels
• Daily routine
• Tech skill
• Hobbies and interests
• Education level
• Job responsibilities/duties
• Shopping and product research habits

Why do we need user personas?

User personas are important tools in user-centered design and development because they help teams create more effective and successful products.

Here’s why you need a user persona:

1. Enhances User Understanding

User personas help you develop a deep understanding of who your users are, it is beyond just demographics. It helps stakeholders, designers, and every high-performing member of the team understand the audience and make more deliberate, user-centered decisions by capturing the objectives, needs, behaviors, and frustrations of the user.

2. Improves product focus

They serve as a continual reminder of the viewpoint of the user, which helps in maintaining the emphasis of product development on finding practical solutions for practical problems. This concentration keeps the project from deviating into features or designs that prioritize trendiness or technological prowess over meeting the needs of the user.

3. Facilitates Team Alignment

Persona gives every team member from the design, development, marketing, and sales departments a common understanding of the target user. By ensuring that everyone is working toward the same objectives and has a common understanding of the user, this alignment helps to avoid misunderstandings and conflicts of priorities.

4. Guides Feature Prioritization

Teams usually prioritize innovations and changes that will benefit users, mostly when they are aware of their goals and problems. As a result, resources are used more wisely, with an emphasis on innovations that improve customer satisfaction and advance corporate goals.

5. Tailors Content and Messaging

63% of content marketers frequently create persona-centric content. User personas have a major impact on marketing and communication tactics, it helps in improving engagement and conversion rates by crafting messages that resonate more effectively because you understand the language, motives, and preferred methods of communication of their users.

6. Enhances User Experience

Personas foster a more fulfilling and customized customer experience- Most buyers feel customer experience is just as important as the product you’re offering to them. Products created with a particular customer in mind are more likely to live up to expectations, resulting in increased customer satisfaction, brand loyalty, and word-of-mouth recommendations.

7. Provides a Benchmark for Usability Testing

To ensure that user feedback for usability testing is obtained from users who closely represent the target audience, user personas are used as a benchmark for recruiting participants. As a result, the conclusions drawn from this kind of testing are more relevant and useful.

How to create a user persona?

Personas helps you make informed decisions about product features, design, marketing strategies, and more by concentrating on your user’s needs, habits, and goals. Here’s a step-by-step process for developing a user persona:

1. Conduct User Research

Use techniques like market research, interviews, surveys, and analysis of current customer data to compile information and pay attention to behavioral data (purchasing patterns, user demands, pain points), psychographic data (interests, values, etc.), and demographic data (age, gender, location, etc.).

2. Identify Patterns and Insights

After gathering the data, you should keep an eye out for patterns in behaviors, goals, needs, and challenges. These patterns will help segment your users into groups and each one will have a persona.

3. Create the Persona

Choose one of the groups you identified in your research to create your first persona. Your personas should include the following components.

• Name and Photo: Give your persona a name and a photo to make it more human.
• Demographics: Age, gender, location, income, education level, and family status.
• Background: Job role, career, and lifestyle.
• Psychographics: Interests, hobbies, values, and attitudes.
• Goals: Both primary and secondary goals that are related to your product or service.
• Challenges and Pain Points: Obstacles they face in achieving their goals.
• How Your Product Helps: Explain how your product or service solves their problems or helps them achieve their goals.
• Preferred Channels: How and where they prefer to receive information (social media, email, etc.).

4. Make It Accessible

Make sure your persona is easily accessible to everyone in your team- It should be presented in a clear, concise, and visually appealing format. Tools like PowerPoint, Canva, or UX design software can help create a professional-looking persona.

5. Use and rework

Always refer to your persona throughout all phases of product development, marketing, and sales strategy. Your personas should be modified to take into account fresh information as your product develops and you gather additional data.

6. Create Additional Personas (if necessary)

You may need to develop more than one persona, depending on the variety of your user base and the type of product you’re offering. But don’t make too many because it could make it difficult for you to concentrate on.  Typically, three to five personas are enough to cover the majority of a user base.

7. Continue to update personas

Over time user personas will evolve, particularly in response to shifting market trends, and as your product expands with continuous product discovery it will attract new customers. Adding new customer personas and updating old ones can help you stay on track with your marketing goals, especially if you’re expanding your business into other sectors, launching new products, or changing anything about your business strategy that can impact consumers.

User persona template

Examples of User Persona

These two examples will  help you understand what a user persona should look like:

1. Persona: Emily, a software engineer

Persona: Emily, a busy professional

Name: Emily Chen

Occupation: Software Engineer

Age: 32

Location: San Francisco, CA

Interests: Technology, hiking, yoga, cooking

Family: Lives with her partner and no pets

Who is Emily? Emily is a software engineer who makes her living in San Francisco’s community. She likes going on hikes and doing yoga, and she relaxes by trying out new dishes. Emily prioritizes productivity and efficiency. 

What are Emily’s pain points? Emily loves cooking, but she finds it difficult to plan meals, shop for supplies, and prepare nutritious dinners regularly because of her busy schedule. She often orders food online, which is detrimental to her health and her finances. Emily’s issue is striking a balance between her busy schedule and her desire to eat sustainably and healthily.

What is Emily’s solution? Emily needs a service that cuts down on the time and work required for meal preparation and planning without sacrificing the type of food or her health goal. She’s looking for a food kit delivery business that provides easy, nutritious dishes with supplies that are portioned out. If she gets this, she will be able to enjoy preparing and consuming wholesome meals at home while also saving time and reducing food wastage.

2. Persona: Jordan, a college student 

Persona: Jordan, a college student

Name: Jordan Smith

Occupation: College Student (Majoring in Environmental Science)

Age: 20

Location: Boulder, CO

Interests: Environmental activism, rock climbing, photography

Family: Lives in a shared apartment with three roommates

Who is Jordan? Jordan is a college student who is passionate about the environment and is currently studying environmental science research and activism. Jordan loves to take pictures of the beauty of nature and he likes climbing rocks. He lives in Boulder, Colorado with roommates and Jordan is constantly looking for how he can live a more environmentally conscious and sustainable lifestyle.

What are Jordan’s pain points? Jordan’s biggest problem is knowing how to balance between his desire to make ecologically friendly decisions, which frequently come at a charge, and his limited student budget. It’s often difficult to find reasonably priced, environmentally responsible goods and services that fit Jordan’s beliefs and a student’s budget. Jordan wants to lessen his carbon footprint, but he finds it difficult to negotiate the complexity of sustainable living in a society that is heavily focused on consumption.

What is Jordan’s solution? Jordan needs access to a platform or service that assists with budget-friendly sustainable lifestyle choices and has reasonably priced, environmentally friendly products. This could include advice on how to recycle efficiently, cut waste, and choose sustainable brands that fit your budget. In an ideal world, this solution would also have a community component that would enable Jordan to meet people who share his values and gain motivation and support for his transition to a more sustainable way of living.

Expert tips for creating your user persona

1. Use real data

Make sure your persona development is backed by real data and avoid imaginative speculation. For instance, suggesting that Kelvin aspires to start a rock band might humanize him, but it’s essential to confirm whether this aligns with your user data and their type of music. If pursuing a music career leads Kelvin to leave his job, would he still be part of your target audience?

The strength of your persona depends on the evidence that backs them up, your persona will be less successful the further you deviate from actual data.

2. Use customer surveys for quick data collection

Customer surveys are the quickest way to go because you can ask precisely the questions you need answers to, and if you ask the right questions, you can even find out personality traits. Depending on your settings, your performance statistics can potentially provide answers to several demographic questions.

Though focus groups aren’t as useful as you may believe, it’s still best to invest in more in-depth user research if you have the time and means, such as through actual user interviews, product testing, diary tests, on-site field trips, and so on.

3. Create multiple personas to represent different groups

Personas serve as a representative of a larger customer group, but what should you do when your customers diversify into different segments and occupy new market niches? Easy, just create additional personalities.

One persona should ideally represent a single group. Some businesses only require one persona to represent all of their clients, others could require a variety of them, particularly businesses. You can also customize separate campaigns for different segments by using multiple personas.

4. Detailed bios

Personas are really helpful in humanizing cold, hard data, and the bio connects all those human elements. Although it could be easy to ignore it or skip it entirely, we implore you to set a goal for yourself to write a realistic and lifelike description of a human being.

Use a background from one of your actual clients if you’re having trouble. If all goes wrong, you can still obtain some information from the social media accounts of your real consumers. Ideally, you will have a user profile from your customer research projects on file.

5. Use persona tools

Although personas can be tailored to suit your preferences in terms of format, pre-made tools, and templates can expedite the process and offer novices a simple starting point.  Tools like  Xtensio, Make My Persona are a useful resource for beginners but will require a subscription for further use.

Wrapping Up

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