Creating user personas is essential for anyone aiming to deliver products that match their audience’s needs.
But what are personas exactly? These are profiles that represent your ideal users. They help you understand who you’re designing the app for.
This article explains user personas’ role in product development, UX design, and app marketing and shows how to create personas for your business.
What are user personas?
User personas represent different groups of people who might use your product or service. They’re crucial in UX design as they detail the target audience’s needs, goals, motivations, and behaviors. Personas help you empathize with your audience and understand their experiences, perspectives, and expectations.
They are typically created from insights obtained through various user research methodologies, such as interviews and surveys, and represent common attributes found across a group of users.
The benefits of user personas in product development
User personas play a crucial role in app development by providing several benefits:
1. App adjusted to users – personas enable designers and developers to better understand different target groups. They also help prioritize features by identifying the most important ones to each user group. The team focuses on building features that provide the most value to the target audience.
2. Improved UX – the team can create more intuitive and user-friendly interfaces by designing with a user persona in mind. This leads to an enhanced UX as the app is more likely to meet the preferences of its target users.
3. Reduced risk– by basing design and development decisions on insights derived from user personas, teams can reduce the risk of building irrelevant features users aren’t interested in. It minimizes the likelihood of costly redesigns and saves time.
4. Team alignment – user personas are a reference point for cross-functional teams, including designers, developers, marketers, and stakeholders. They help everyone involved in the project look at the target audience from a similar perspective, facilitating collaboration.
5. Enhanced marketing strategy – personas tell us about users’ preferences, motivations, and pain points, enabling more targeted marketing efforts.
Types of user personas
There are different types of user personas, each suited to various scenarios. Let’s examine two main types: proto personas and data-informed personas.
Proto personas
They are based on assumptions. The team puts them together and uses them as a starting point when there’s limited time or resources for extensive user research.
Data-informed personas
We create these personas with real user data from research. There are two types of data-informed personas. The first one, qualitative persona, is based on data from a small sample size. As the name suggests, information comes from a qualitative research methods, such as user interviews or usability tests. The second type, statistical persona, relies on qualitative methods as well but combines it with quantitative data, for example, from surveys.
Crafting data-informed personas
It’s time to delve into the process of creating data-informed personas. After all, the more accurate your personas are, the better your product will resonate with your users. For this reason, it’s best to combine qualitative and quantitative data.
- Step 1. Collecting qualitative data (e.g., about problems, lifestyle, goals)
When people share their experiences and thoughts with you, you can get more information about their liefstyle, problems, pain points, motivations, and goals. You can also find out what they do to overcome the obstacles and what the available solutions lack.
Conducting in-depth user interviews is one way of getting such info. Depending on the problem, you can also try different research methods, such as contextual interviews or observations.
- Step 2. Collecting quantitative data
Data from sources such as app analytics or surveys offers a comprehensive view of customer interactions and engagement patterns. It gives you insights into user behavior.
From surveys, you can also find out which age group your persona should represent, where they live, and what their personal and professional background is. Additionally, you can look for more information in the industry reports and related articles.
- Step 3. Data analysis
When you have done your research, you probably have tons of data. What should you do with it? Organizing the information is the key. You can start by dividing users into segments – groups of people with something in common. For example, you may have one user group that lives with their families and another that lives alone.
Then, you can create topic clusters. The affinity diagram is helpful at this point. Another thing you can do is to discuss the data in a group and choose the elements and information that you find particularly insightful to your project. Finally, select the most important user groups for your business and focus on info related to them.
Characteristics that make persona useful
Now, concentrate on the elements that make a persona helpful in a project. It should include essential information about the target user.
As an example, let’s choose a persona called Xavier. You can focus on the following characteristics to describe him:
- Goals the user wants to achieve: He wants to buy a house.
- Needs they have: His husband and two kids need a place to stay.
- Motivations that make them want to achieve their goals: They don’t want to worry if they would have to leave the place they’re renting. They also want to decorate the house so they can feel more comfortable.
- Problems that describe the user’s pain points and tell you what frustrates or annoys the persona: They need to remember many things and get lost in all the details. They aren’t familiar with some terms and rules in the real estate market.
- Fears that stop the user from taking action: They are afraid they will forget to check something and will choose the wrong offer. It is stressful because buying a house is a big decision.
- Personal and professional situation related to the persona’s environment and everyday life: Xavier is 35 years old. He is a father of two kids and a husband. He lives with his family in France. Xavier works as a tattoo artist. In his free time, he sculpts and co-organizes an art festival.
- Quotes from the interviews that represent the persona’s approach to a problem you want to tackle (e.g., “I always wanted to have a place of my own where I could truly feel at home, but the more I learn about the real estate market, the more I am overwhelmed with information.”
Remember that persona profiles can differ depending on your specific needs and the template you use. The information above is just a start. You can elaborate on it and add more details derived from your research.
It’s easier to rely on assumptions and stereotypes when creating personas instead of data. In such cases, the final result usually doesn’t reflect the real users’ situation. It’s important to create personas based on UX research. This way, you know that they are representative.
Template for creating personas
Though creating personas can be complex, many templates available online streamline this process. Let’s examine some of them.
FigJam
FigJam is an easy-to-use, collaborative tool that facilitates developing personas in a remote team. In this free template, you focus on characteristics related to interests, influences, goals, needs and expectations, motivations, pain points, and frustrations. Additionally, you can add demographic information, a short bio, and personality traits.
Miro
Miro’s collaborative space allows you and your team to work on the same board remotely. This tool offers a template that enables you to organize user research data as a first step. Then, you can create user personas and discuss their motivations, pain points, values, and even context that tells us about the user environment. Finally, you can decide what to do next based on the user persona you’ve just prepared.
Mural
This tool enables building user personas based on the Product School of Silicon Valley’s template. There are tips that will help you include everything you need to create a realistic character. When all your user personas are ready, you can assign them a category.
Romanpichler.com
It is not an online customizable template, but it’s so simple that you can easily recreate it in FigJam or Miro. It consists of only basic elements of a user persona divided into the following categories: Picture & Name, Details, and Goal. You can complete it using the questions its author, Roman Pichler, provided. Create a persona with this template if you want a profile that focuses solely on the most important matters and is easy to remember.
Utilizing personas for UI design
Personas guide UX design by concentrating on specific user needs and providing a framework for validating design choices.
Additionally, designers can use personas to prioritize functionalities that resonate most with the target users, avoiding investment in non-essential features.
Aligning marketing efforts with user personas
Personas’ usefulness extends beyond product design and development. They play a significant role in marketing, too.
Personas enable marketers to create content that effectively engages their target demographic, focusing on real people and their needs. You can also use them to create campaigns that are better adjusted to the target audience.
Refining personas through feedback
The creation of personas is just the beginning. As with any tool, they require constant refinement and updating based on ongoing feedback. You can get information, for example, from surveys, user interviews, or usability testing. This way, you can validate user personas by confirming they accurately represent user behavior and experiences.
Personas to improve the processes
It’s best to implement your personas across your company or organization. You can present them on posters in the conference rooms, send them via email, mention them during brainstorming and strategic sessions, etc.
Why? This way, every department, from design to marketing, focuses on the same target users. They allow all company members to understand your users at a granular level, helping you design solutions that truly resonate with them.
