What Is a User Persona? & How To Build One for Business?

There are techniques available that are unquestionably more likely to assist you in doing it, even if no one provides all of the solutions for producing incredibly profitable products. Making user personas to identify the target audience for your designs is one of these techniques. 

What Is a User Persona?

The user persona was created in the 1990s as a tool for gaining insightful knowledge about the target market for a product as well as the user’s needs and preferences. It is a made-up profile centered on the demographics of the app’s primary users.

The User Persona’s Structure

A made-up name and a user portrait often make up their user persona. This would be followed by a concise bio that includes a non-fictional assessment of the person’s age, gender, employment, hobbies, likes, and views associated with individual datasets.

Why Do You Need User Personas?

1. Understanding Motivations and Needs

The first stage is user testing to comprehend the target audience’s attitudes, drives, and behaviors. It’s crucial to get as much data and understanding about users as possible by speaking with and watching a large enough variety of individuals who correspond to a target audience. 

2. Eliminating Pain Points Easily.

The analysis of study results is the next phase. Finding patterns in the user research information that allows for the classification of comparable persons into user types is the aim of this stage. An expert has proposed a straightforward approach:

• When the research is complete, list every behavioral variable or ways users’ behavior varies.
• Match the characteristics of each respondent or actual user to the relevant collection of variables.
• Find patterns or a group of individuals clustered across six to eight factors. Then, you can prepare each persona depending on these classification trends.

3. Uncovering the Differences in Purchase Habits

Assembling a persona’s characteristics around behavioral patterns is crucial next. Here, the researcher’s job is to characterize each persona in a way that conveys just the right amount of comprehension and empathy to comprehend the consumers. However, the procedure may spiral out of control if several identities exist. 

4. Exploring New Areas

Personas are connected to a scenario would they become useful. A hypothetical scenario outlines how a person uses a brand in a certain situation to accomplish its objective(s). Here, it would be best to consider the persona’s viewpoint while writing scenarios, which are often prepared to a greater extent and include use cases that are likely to occur.

5. Preventing Confusion

Don’t exaggerate personas in your business plan. Instead of becoming lost in the fluctuations of every conceivable aspect, the emphasis must be placed on the key motives influencing the purchasing choice.

5 Essentials to A Good User Persona Template

1. Bare Necessities

Basic customer data is an integral part of the overall user persona design. Typically, the following details should be included when constructing a user persona layout:

• Persona name
• Gender, age, region, relationship status, and family information
• Photograph
• Needs and objectives
• Pain spots or frustrations
• Behavioral traits
• Identifiable personality traits, such as a phrase or quote

2. Pictures

Images are more powerful storytellers than any quantity of prose. You humanize your identity once you give it a face. This helps you understand how your designs and goods may affect this person’s life much easier.

3. Personality

The personality of your user persona may be described or shown, which can help you better understand them and make design choices that benefit them. There are three approaches to address this section:

• Myers-Briggs
• Axis X-Y
• Descriptions

4. Goals and Motivations

You should include your users’ objectives and driving forces in this area. Therefore, you generally would not create a user persona that contained a purpose if you were building a fitness service. They would likely instead have a similar objective.

5. Pain Points

Beyond anything else, your design choices should be influenced by the problems that your target consumers have. That’s because they show you specifically how your product can benefit them.

Also read: Types of eCommerce Consumer Personas and How To Use Them?

Case Study: Creating User Personas for Google’s UX Design Certificate

The user personas can be composed of personalities based on truthful information from our interview respondents. I launched a Google doc and added two categories to establish my personas. Each area would have unique traits that would guide a certain persona. As I looked over my data, I questioned what was crucial to identify one group from another. Fortunately, the course includes model personas and detailed methods for solving this problem.

1. Here Are My Classifications

2. Introducing Sarah and Bill, My Personas

A) The User Profile Sarah Santiago

B) The User Profile Bill Miller

What Should a User Persona Consist Of?

Let’s begin with some fundamental theories. A straightforward persona provides the following responses, as did the ones that Smallpdf finally developed:

1. Who Are You?

You’re searching for specifics that summarise your persona’s perspective on selecting and utilizing your product, such as a B2C salesperson employed by a large organization or office administrator who oversees digital and paper communication.

2. What’s Your Main Goal?

This will help you comprehend how your service or product truly fits into the lives of your consumers and clients. 

3. What’s Your Main Barrier to Achieving This Goal?

Now that you’ve become aware of who your current customers have become and what they hope to achieve, one more lesson to study: what prevents them from purchasing your item or employing it more frequently, better, or proficiently?

5 Steps to Creating User Personas

1. Step One: Gather the Right Data

Good user research is the cornerstone of a strong persona; the worth of your persona would reflect on the worth of your data. What would be User Research and What’s Its Purpose by CareerFoundry is a wonderful place to start if you haven’t previously done your user research and require some assistance.

2. Step Two: Interpret Your Data

It’s time to analyze your results now that you have the data. This may be both exhilarating and stressful at the same time. It will require a little more work to evaluate the descriptive method. It is time to create your initial user persona to combine some of the simulation and practical insights you’ve gleaned from your data.

3. Step Three: Organize Elements

It’s time to give your character some life after all your hard work gatherings and analyzing your data. While there are some universal components you should consider, you may arrange your character as you wish. These components are present in the user persona template available for download.

4. Step Four: Selecting Images for Your Persona

Now that your data has been transformed at least once, but probably several other personas, it’s time to choose pictures for each. The following are some crucial factors to bear in mind while you search for or create images:

• Stock imagery isn’t always the greatest option, even if it’s the simplest.
• Do the people in your pictures have similar traits to you and your group regarding skill, culture, education, background, physical shape, or gender? It could be necessary to diversify.

5. Step Five: Finishing Touches

You want to create your unique design to stand out when you’ve completed it. You may uncover countless instances of user personas by performing a fast image search. As you go to these pictures, pay attention. Which identities do you scroll through because the wording is too overpowering? Which personalities catch your eye and quickly give you a sense of that user? A sentence you would like to stand out from the rest might benefit from a larger font, a splash of color, or the use of symbols to communicate quickly with visual cues.

Common Mistakes While Creating User Persona

The caliber of your identity depends on the information you gather and provide. Several other elements can affect how beneficial they are, including the following:

1. Too Much Narrative Detail Can Undermine the Credibility

Too many imaginary elements that aren’t essential might cause you and your organization to lose focus on the main objective, which is to create a solution that satisfies particular customer demand. 

2. Being Too General Can Undermine Inclusion

Persona creation is not a flawless process, and personal biases might affect how we perceive the findings, whether conscious or unconscious. Because of this, you must consider inclusion while creating your personas.

3. Personas Need to Be Used Alongside Other Tools

Personas are intended to assist you in creating user-friendly solutions, but that is only one element of a successful commodity. Additionally, you should consider whether your ideas are the best for the situation at hand, how they fit with the company’s objectives, and if they are technically feasible.

Differences Between a User and Buyer Persona?

A customer and user persona may seem very distinct from a business perspective. A buyer persona maybe someone who decides to acquire new technology for the business even if they do not use it personally. Conversely, the average consumer utilizing the technology would be a user persona, mostly from a company perspective.

Conclusion

Personas are useful resources. Personas enable designers to operate more conscientiously by putting the actual user at the center of all they do. When used effectively, user personas reduce the complexity of the current design process by assisting designers in achieving their objective of providing the target users with a positive UX.

Frequently Asked Questions