13 Tips for Creating User Personas

Designing a product without knowing users' needs is like riding a bike blindfolded. You can do it, but you won't make it far, and you'll most likely end up getting bruised along the way. A user persona should be your go-to tool to understand your users' world and make the right design decisions.

The following benefits can be brought up in a conversation with a client or executive who doesn't believe in the value of user personas:

• Personas help a team understand and keep in mind the needs of users and create a product they actually need.
• Personas help a team prioritize features and develop ones that users need more.
• Personas evoke empathy for users among teammates.
• Personas help teams create a brand image that meets the expectations of users.

What is a user persona?

Many people think personas are just fictional characters that exist only for fun and don't take them seriously. However, a persona is not Santa Claus! If anything, it's more like a defense lawyer who speaks on the user's behalf, advocates for their rights and desires, and helps creators build products that last forever. Scientifically speaking, a persona is a fictional but realistic collective image of your users or a particular group of them. The goal of creating personas is to reflect users' motivations, fears, pains, gains, and behavioral patterns.

Things to keep in mind:

• A persona isn't a real person — don't let the name confuse you. It outlines the needs, experiences, behaviors, and goals that most people from your target audience have in common.
• A persona is not an object of mockery, jokes, or games. Remember that it is a business document that you share with your clients and investors, and treat it as such.

Engage your team and empathize

Let's be clear — a persona isn't a single-use tool to get a primary understanding of your users and call it a day. It should become the only and permanent source of truth guiding your team's decisions along the way. For example, if you stumble upon a problem, keep the persona in mind and try to answer the question, "What would Mark think of this design?" or "What would Jane do if she accidentally deletes her profile?"

Before diving into research, gather your team for a brainstorming session, put yourselves into your users' shoes, and try to answer the essential questions:

• Who are your typical users?
• Why would they use your product in the first place?
• When and how often do they usually use your product?
• What do they see, hear, think, and do when they have a problem that your product can solve?

These questions will teach your teammates to empathize with users and get everyone on board so the persona isn't just a piece of wall decoration in the office.

Conduct user research

A viable persona should only use actual data. The more you stray from reality, the more damage the persona could bring to your product. This might seem obvious, but teams often decide to go the easy route and create personas built on hypotheses exclusively. While assumptions can help you create a persona, you should always check the facts.

Once you develop some ideas, get out and do some user research. The fastest and cheapest route to collect data about the target audience is looking at your website or app analytics. It usually provides basic demographic data, usage time, and patterns of user behavior.

The next step can involve social media channels. Users' comments, forums, and reviews can give a lot of food for thought. If you have enough resources, you can go deeper, conduct user interviews, and get firsthand information.

🧠 Pro Tip: Check out our UX Research course to learn the ropes of researching for your product.

Pick the right format

The choice of a persona template should rely on your goals. For a small team's needs, a whiteboard filled with sticky notes and the persona's photograph might be more than enough. However, for a diverse remote team or for sharing with clients, consider the following options:

• Google Slides or PowerPoint: Classic methods will never let you down — these tools allow you to simultaneously fill the sections with your teammates, change the order of slides, adjust information, and leave comments. You can also send the link with permission to view or comment to your clients to get their thoughts and ideas.
• Websites with predefined templates: Websites like UXPressia, Miro, or InVision's Freehand provide free persona templates, so all you need is to type in data and upload the photo. You can also share it with your team so everyone can bring something to the table.
• Drawing tools: If you're good with wireframing, you can craft a beautiful and unique persona template in Sketch, Figma, or Photoshop.

Choose a photo

Once you add a photo, the persona is no longer an abstract character. More importantly, the photo becomes the most engaging part of your persona — it can change your team's attitude from "okay, whatever" to feeling more empathy and even compassion toward your users.

Make an effort to search for a realistic photo that reflects the personality of your users or illustrates the environment in which people use your product.

To find the right image, try to answer these questions:

• Are your users at home or work?
• Are they alone or with someone like kids or spouses?
• Do they get along with new technologies or feel intimidated by them?
• What personalities, hobbies, and interests do they have that might influence their looks?

Keep yourself from falling into the trap of stock images that show flawless people in a perfect environment. Also, avoid using photos of your colleagues, friends, or relatives, even if they represent the target audience. Otherwise, you risk presenting a biased view of that persona. To make the persona even more relatable, give them a name and/or surname.

Add demographic traits

Demographic details like age, gender, location, job title, and marital status are the bare necessities of any persona. They briefly introduce your users and evoke some empathy even at an early stage. Your website/app analytics can be the perfect source of demographic data. However, not all data might be relevant to your product. For example, marital status, occupation, and income are helpful for a banking app but have little value for an English learning website. So, make sure you mention this data for a reason.

A word of caution — don't use demographic data as the only source for creating personas. It's a strategy that works only for market segmentation goals. Avoid making assumptions about users' needs and pains based on age, gender, race, and income, and build your personas on research insights.

Create the persona's story and background

A good background story of your persona is a step forward to getting a better understanding of your users. Ask and answer the following questions:

• What interests and hobbies do they have?
• What time do they usually wake up?
• How does their average day go?
• Do they prefer coffee or tea, dogs or cats?
• Do they live alone or share an apartment with a friend or family?

Try to think of anything that might give you insight and make a difference in product behavior and functionality. For example, if you're creating an app for renting housing, you might want to indicate if your persona has pets, smokes, or works odd hours. Avoid irrelevant details that may cause cluttering and confusion.

Define the persona's goals

The next step is to consider why users choose your product. What are their goals? The tricky part is to try to look beyond the obvious and dig a little deeper. Imagine you're working on a writing assistant tool. What goals do your users pursue? The goal "they want to compose emails free of spelling errors" wouldn't lead you anywhere good. Instead, goals like "users don't want to hear a lecture from their boss, get fired, and feel like losers" sound more realistic and human.

When composing a persona's goals, try to reach out to your users, talk to them, and learn what functionality can really get them hooked.

Consider the persona's pains and gains

Pains and gains are the hottest sections of your persona's profile. This information should be your source of wisdom to drive efficient design decisions. What are the problems that make your users' lives miserable? What frustrates them the most and forces them to find a product or service like yours?

As for gains or motivations, think of positive things that your product can give to your audience and make their lives easier. What does your app or website have that users won't find anywhere else? Write it down and use it as a guideline the next time your conversions decrease or when your team has doubts about new functionality.

Include other details

The best thing about a persona is that it doesn't have to follow any ironclad format — you can include any information you consider helpful for your product development. In addition to demographics, goals, motivations, and pains, consider describing skills, favorite brands, social networks they use daily, and devices that might influence their behavior and decision-making. Also, quotations from interviews with users will speak volumes about your users and their expectations of the product.

A word of caution — keep the persona document up to 1-2 pages and avoid including information that's unlikely to help your team solve user-related problems.

Create scenarios for personas

How do you know that the personas you've created are credible? You'd need to test them in the context of the problem users want to solve. Imagine you're a screenwriter who's setting up a scene and think of scenarios imitating a real-life situation that may trigger users to use your product.

For each persona, consider things like:

• Their specific location
• Who or what surrounds the persona
• What device they use
• What motivates them to use your product
• Whether they're in a hurry, on public transport, or sitting comfortably on a couch

This section may help you retrieve information about your persona that you accidentally missed out on or haven't thought about.

Create multiple personas

Having multiple user personas for your product can be justified at times. For example, when your target audience includes diverse user groups. To create a fully-fledged design that fits all of them, you need to consolidate people into several personas. So, how many personas are enough?

The number of personas depends on your product scope. If you've conducted a handful of interviews and understand that users' needs, pains, and behavioral patterns don't fit into one group, create more personas. If you still need a magic number, 3-5 personas are usually enough in most cases.

Regularly revise personas

Some teams assume having a persona is a valid excuse for not doing any research anymore. Firstly, a persona isn't a rigid template that you create once and for good. It requires a lot of tedious work, many iterations, and updates each time you discover some new facts about your audience.

Secondly, chances are you find some personas insufficient or too small and drop them out. Or, you might realize you need to attract other user segments to your product and put new personas in priority.

Also, your business needs or competitor landscape might change over time, and your personas should reflect this change adequately.

Don't fall into the wrong assumption that you know everything about your audience. Talk to them — we bet you'll be surprised.

Ultimately, well-crafted personas serve as powerful tools for fostering empathy, aligning team efforts, and driving user-centered design decisions. They help bridge the gap between assumptions and reality, ensuring that your product development is always focused on solving real user problems and delivering meaningful experiences. By following these 13 tips, you can develop personas that truly represent your target audience and guide your design decisions.