What are Personas?

UX designer has to start the design process by conducting user research, building empathy with their target users, and identifying exactly what they need from the product, this is exactly what user Personas helps you with. User Personas is simply a fictional but realistic portrayal of a target user for your application or website. In this article, we will understand what a Persona is. how to create it? and will also go through a sample User Persona.

What are Personas?

What are Personas?

Personas are imaginary characters or persons that a designer creates in the form of a document as a representative of the users that will eventually use the application or website. Personas are actually just documents containing information about user’s needs, behavior, and other information that a designer may need to understand his or her target audience better for example demographics, age, gender, motivation to use the product, etc. Personas help the UX designer to decide what to prioritize in the design making it more effective for the users.

User Persona helps us answer the following questions:

1. Who is my target customer?
2. What are my user’s behavior patterns?
3. What are the needs and goals of my users?
4. What issues and pain points do my users currently face?

Sample User Persona

Shubham Singh

“Having a Co-founder is essential in the journey of a startup and finding it is not easy.”

Age: 24

Location: Delhi, India

Job: Cloud Native Developer

Education: Post Graduate

Gender: Male

Martial Status: Not Married

Preferences:

• Exercises
• Sports
• Console games
• Gym
• Yoga
• Movies

Bio:

Shubham is a Cloud Native Engineer from Delhi India. He has just started working for a remote startup and is looking for expanding his skills. He graduated from one of the best universities in the country just an year ago and he has an year of experience in Cloud Native Engineering. He is also interested in pursuing entrepreneurship. Shubham is able to support his family and along with that does a lot of savings. He focuses in minimizing his expenses. Regarding Entrepreneurship, he is looking for a co founder and is active in social media applications like Instagram and LinkedIn where he approaches people with an offer to join him as a cofounder so that he can start out a business.

Habits:

• Playing Cricket with friends
• Attending tech meetups
• Playing Console games
• Watching movies and web series
• Watching Shark Tank and reading books on entrepreneurship

Motivations:

• Wants to start out as an entrepreneur and is looking for people to join him in his founding team. these people should be credible and should have knowledge about their field as well as basics of business.
• Shubham wants to connect to new people to increase his network and find potential clients and also people who can guide him through in his journey of entrepreneurship.
• He wants to contact an incubation center where he can assemble a team and start building an application for his upcoming business.

Pain Points:

• Shubham is unable to find trustable partners who are experts in their field and can join him as his co founders and the core founding team.
• Shubham is looking for people to connect with but he finds it difficult to connect with people on social media platforms like Instagram or LinkedIn where people who have expertise in their field are not very active.
• Shubham cannot find a website where he can find people with similar interests in entrepreneurship and build his network.

How to create Personas?

Step 1. User Research

In order to create a User Persona, we as designers first need to have conduct research on our users and the market and gathered sufficient quantitative and qualitative data. All this data we collected must then be organized into different persona groups that represent different user groups we want to target.

Step 2. Persona Header

The second step in the process is to add a header to the User Persona. A Header includes a fictional name, an image and a short bio that summarizes what matters most to the Persona in relation to our product. In our example this quote is – “Having a Co-founder is essential in the journey of a startup and finding it is not easy.”

Step 3. Demographics

The nest step in the process is to create a demographic profile of the User Persona. These details are based on user research and the demographic profile of your persona can be divided into four main sections:

1. Bio
2. Professional Background
3. User environment
4. Psychographics

Step 4. End goals or Motivations

The next step in the process is to add information about the user’s end goals. The end goal is a motivating factor that inspires action and focuses on what the users want or need to accomplish when using your product. So our example the end goal is – “Shubham wants to start out as an entrepreneur and is looking for people to join him in his founding team. these people should be credible and should have knowledge about their field as well as basics of business”.

Step 5. Pain Points

The last step in building Personas is to identify and note down the Pain Points of the Persona. Pain Points are the issues that the user is facing with the current alternative of your product. These Pain Points helps us build empathy with our target users.

After all these steps, your User Persona with look quite similar to the example Person we created in the previous section.

Importance of Personas

Importance of Personas can be understood under following points:

• Understanding your users: Creating Personas are one of the better ways to understand our target user, since we have a document that clearly states the demographics, introduction and other details of the users, it becomes quite simple to understand the user and what the user needs.
• Studying customer behavior: Persona is a document that contains all the pain points and motivations of the target customer, this helps in understanding the customer’s behavior and deliever them features based on the finding of the study.
• Better Communication on user’s need: Miscommunication is very common between the various teams in an organization. Personas states facts rather than opinions about the target users, this really helps in communication between various teams.
• Giving users what they want: A Persona helps in empathizing with the user. This means it helps the designer get into the user’s shoes and think and feel how the user thinks and feels. This enables designers to design keeping in mind the users need as a priority.

How to Use Personas in Design Projects

Following are the most common ways in which designers use Personas in their design project:

• Personas are a mostly used as a starting point in ideation process.
• It can be used for proving context for user stories.
• Personas are also used to design storyboards.
• Personas are used for empathizing with the user in design thinking process.
• Personas are used as characters for usability reviews as well.

Conclusion

User Personas is simply a fictional but realistic portrayal of a target user for your application or website. Each Persona represents an entire group or audience of users that you wish to target. UX designer has to start the design process by conducting user research, building empathy with your target users and identifying exactly what they need from the product, this is exactly what user Personas helps you with. Make sure to follow the points mentioned in the article in your next design project for getting best results.