Personas are fictional characters that product, design and marketing teams create to represent the main users of their product. Personas keep teams customer-focused.
It’s easy for product managers or UX designers to focus on a single user flow and neglect how certain decisions might impact other users. Or, marketing teams could easily get stuck focusing on an existing, saturated market segment when they should really be tailoring their strategy to attract more lucrative markets.
Personas help businesses remember, visualize and empathize with their target customers.
To create a user persona, teams work together to:
- Identify each product’s demographic and psychographic profile type (e.g. admin, human resource, employees, etc)
- Include a short bio for each profile (1-2 paragraphs)
- Note accolades like education or certificates (if applicable)
- Bullet point their general interests, desires and struggles (directly or indirectly related to the product)
- Note what motivates them and why they use your product
For example:
User type: Admin
Name: Joyce
Demographics: 45 year old single mother
Psychographics: Values convenience and quality; sometimes impatient with buggy tech
Bio: Joyce grew up in Alabama but now lives in Chicago. She worked her way through school and values streamlined processes. She is the CTO of a mid-sized human resource software company. She is very busy balancing her responsibilities at work and in her personal life. She has a 12 year old boy named Jon and a cat named Roxy.
Accolades:
- Bachelor of computer science (BCS) from Cambridge University
- Master of Science, Human Resource Management (MSHRM) from Roosevelt University
Interests/Desires:
- Helping people find their calling in life
- Automating and speeding up internal processes
- Empowering others to get stuff done
- Spending time with son and friends
Why Joyce uses the product:
- Joyce only uses the product to measure usage and reports.
- She wants others within the organization to use it to reduce the amount of interruptions she used to get on a daily basis.
Personas can be broadcast in highly visible places so that product and marketing teams can easily reference them. They also serve as useful tools for the whole company to refer to to bring existing or desired customers to life.