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What is a user persona and how do i make one.

14 min read Creating personas can be extremely beneficial for making effective design, product and content decisions. Learn how to make and utilize user personas with our guide below.

Written by: Rosemin Anderson

Fact Checked by: Arwen Behrends

What is a user persona?

A user persona is a fictional but realistic character based on research and actual data that exemplifies a user for your business. A user persona is an in-depth profile of this typical person, with information about their goals, needs, background, attitudes and pain points.

This allows businesses to capture all the information they need to design products and create content that will be effective, as well as creating a more human-like way of representing research. With the right data, building user personas can be a highly effective way of representing your potential user’s needs and interests whenever you’re considering experiences, creating products, developing marketing and more.

But what information should you include in a user persona, and how do you bring it all together to start using your personas effectively? Read on to find out more.

What does a user persona consist of?

There are generally two types of approach to create personas: formulating a prototype or an archetype, or developing a full persona.

User archetypes will often be based on a limited amount of data or research, and are likely to be more one-dimensional, focusing on one specific goal or need fulfillment. They’ll contain higher-level descriptions, but not go into much detail on each specific user type.

A full persona is based on more in-depth research and data, and is likely to include the following:

• Identifying characteristics: This could be a name or nickname, or a “quote” that helps to identify this persona as distinct
• Demographics : This can include their age, marital status, number of children etc.
• Relevant user environment : What type of user environment might be assigned to this persona – are they a computer user or a mobile user?
• Behaviors: What actions do they typically take or behavior do they display?
• Attitudes: What are their attitudes towards religion, politics, social classes, the environment etc.?
• Interests: What are their interests and hobbies?
• Motivations: What drives them to take action?
• Pain points: What issues cause them friction or put them off?
• End goals: What is their end goal for any transaction or interaction with your brand?
• Scenario: What specific setting will they encounter your business in?

More than one persona is likely needed to represent all of the users you’d like to target. Ideally you’ll create a persona for the most important user groups you have, with your ideal customer or user in mind for each one.

Watch demo: Bring the voice of the user into every experience

User persona vs buyer persona

Though sometimes user personas and buyer personas can represent the same people, a user persona depicts the person who will be utilizing the end product or service. A buyer persona may also use the items they purchase, but they may be buying them for someone else or on behalf of an organization.

For example, a buyer persona could be a mother looking for children’s clothes, and a user persona could be her child. Both will have varying needs, desires and behaviors, which require a different approach.

When to use a user persona

A user persona can be helpful throughout all of a business’ processes, but here are two common times a user persona is created and used:

During strategic sessions

When a business needs to make informed decisions on new or current offerings, creating a user persona can help to establish a deeper understanding of your customers’ needs and pain points. Figuring out who your target audience is, the issues they face and identifying the highest opportunity for solutions means you’re more likely to design products and services that resonate.

When training your teams

Aligning your team members correctly is important. By employing user personas, your teams are more easily able to see the human side of your research. Personas become easier to remember because they’re more than just data – they’re a “person” they can empathize with. Creating a user persona means that all your teams, no matter their function, are referring to the same set of information when making decisions that could impact the end user’s experience .

The benefits of creating user personas

There are several benefits to creating user personas. Here are the top ones from the list:

User personas can greatly improve decision-making

User personas are primarily created to help inform and evaluate your products, services, designs and content decisions. By developing in-depth user personas, you’re more easily able to understand the needs and paint points you have to navigate, and develop experiences that delight each individual type of user.

Complex decision-making can become much easier with a defined user in mind, rather than creating products for an abstract set of data or designing services based on your own team’s opinions. Personas help your team to form clearer design principles to better meet your audience’s needs and expectations.

You’re able to target users more effectively

When you have a specific persona in mind, targeting becomes more effective and efficient. Rather than guessing at motivations or hoping that designs will work, you’re able to more effectively target your efforts for greater outcomes. Whether you’re doing market research, creating advertising, testing usability or optimizing your content, you’re able to aim for a defined “person” based on data and research, instead of guessing at what will deliver results.

Your ability to streamline improves with predictions

Data-led decisions means you can feel more secure when it comes to streamlining your offering and predicting future user behavior. If your teams believe that your target user is likely to buy an item based on certain features, they can focus their efforts on optimizing those particular features first, for example. Without user behavior data built into user personas, making these decisions around user needs becomes more difficult and predictions are harder to pin down.

Things to be aware of when creating user personas

There are a few caveats to making and utilizing user personas. Here are our top tips below:

Be careful when using demographic information

Using demographic information has to be done well – or it can lead to false assumptions that can lead to incorrect or irrelevant personas. Demographic data such as age or gender can create assumptions that don’t have a basis in reality for your users or their interactions with your product or service. Be careful to only use proven, data-based demographic information, or you risk introducing unintended biases or stereotypes that could negatively impact your results.

Understand if there’s really a need for a user persona

Creating in-depth, highly valuable user personas can be worthwhile – when they are needed. Creating detailed user personas with qualitative and quantitative research and data can be expensive and time-consuming, so be sure that a user persona is the best way to spend your time and budget. You might find your queries can be answered with more specific research in a particular area, rather than creating a persona.

Developing personas isn’t a one-time activity

Creating your user personas isn’t a one-and-done type of activity. Research should be ongoing, with persona data and user profiles updated periodically to reflect changing attitudes and needs. Your user persona of six months ago could be very different to the type of customer or buyer you have now, so make sure you review them over time.

How to create a user persona

Decide what you need to know about each persona.

First, you need to figure out what information will be the most useful to know. You can ask yourself the following questions about each persona to help guide you:

• What is this person trying to accomplish?
• How are they using this product to accomplish their goal?
• What are the psychographic characteristics of this person that will shape their product use?
• What are the needs or opportunity areas for this person?

Use quantitative methods of user research

A quantitative approach to a user persona helps you to gather information on the “what” of your user persona. This includes demographic data, behavioral data , analysis results and more. These are more beneficial when applied to large sample sizes , as you can better collect data on numerous personas and their dimensions. You can confirm the results more definitively with a wider database of information.

You can use quantitative methods such as:

Testing the validity of your hypothesized personas can be completed with data from surveys , delivered to a large number of participants. Basing the surveys around themes and looking for trends and patterns between survey responses and participant characteristics can help to inform your persona creation.

Analyzing behavioral data

Accessing existing company data and applying analytics can help to determine user behavior related to your products. This knowledge can then help to provide more accurate behavior models for your user personas.

Statistical analysis

Analyzing your quantitative data using statistical techniques , such as Latent Class Analysis, Hierarchical Clustering, Factor Analysis or K-Means/K-Modes, can illuminate elements of bias and identify previously hidden patterns in user responses.

Use qualitative methods for user research

A qualitative approach to a user persona helps you to gather information on the “why” of your user persona. This includes their motivations, their preferences, their desires and more.

A small-sample user session can help you to confirm assumptions are correct. You can use from 5 to over 30 users in these sessions to try and capture data for your hypothesized personas and their different dimensions of interest. Though each individual’s contributions might not be reflective of the entire persona, you can start to understand why a persona might make certain choices or do particular things.

Analysis should be about discovering patterns and commonalities between participants, and looking at them from a macro perspective to determine if those patterns are meaningfully explained by shared user characteristics such as goals, user environment, or background.

Qualitative research types you might use include:

User interviews

Interviewing existing or potential users for their views on particular aspects of your design or experiences can help you to understand their motivations. In their own voice, you can capture their viewpoint and use the valuable insights you glean to drive future designs.

Contextual inquiries

Contextual inquiries are a type of research approach that allows researchers to discover the reasons behind customer behavior and make more accurate user personas as a result. The researcher is able to learn about user tasks, behavior and motivations by observing a user in action and asking for explanations. Seeing how your predicted user behavior actually plays out in a more real-world context can help confirm theories and illuminate the why behind specific user actions. You might discover reasons for customer behavior are obvious when viewed situationally.

Flesh out your personas

The most holistic personas come from using quantitative and qualitative methods together to both understand user behavior at scale and deeply understand the motivations, emotions, and experience behind these behaviors.

Enriching your initial thoughts with all the data you’ve collected means you can form user personas that have a firm basis in reality, and accurately reflect the type of user you want to target.

Share your personas with your teams

Your user personas aren’t just helpful for strategy – they can be powerful tools for teams across your business. Whether it’s helping your design teams to make more ergonomic products or your customer service team to anticipate customer frustrations, personas should be shared widely to help guide your team’s actions.

User persona examples

Here’s a user persona template to help you create user personas that are relevant to your needs.

Here, we’ve created a potential ideal customer for a car brand, based on qualitative and quantitative user research but with fictional personal details.

How Qualtrics® can help

Qualtrics UX research solution allow you to quickly conduct end-to-end customer research from one platform. You’re able to easily capture the results of your qualitative and quantitative research and feed data into one analytical hub, collecting all the data you need for user personas that resonate.

Build your own studies rapidly with our drag-and-drop interface, and feed information back into your analytics automatically. Easy user panel creation and management takes the hassle out of collecting information and finding users, with over 200 million verified and screened potential participants on our database.

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User Personas: Your Guide to Building Personas for UX

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How to create UX personas: 9 steps to building personas

In this chapter we’ll explore how UX designers can create user personas in nine steps. From conducting user research to persona mapping to conducting and distributing your personas to ensure they remain effective.

User personas are a necessary user research step in order to deliver empathetic, inclusive, usable products . However, uncovering the process of how to create user personas is a challenging one. This chapter will break down how you can build user personas to hit your product-led growth goals and avoid user assumptions along the way.

We’re not our users, even if we’re adjacent to them.

Ash Oliver , UX Designer & Design Advocate at Maze

Put time on your calendar for user personas

Before we even begin on this path to creating useful user personas, UX designers and user researchers need to know that in order to create personas, you need to create time first.

Book some time in your calendars. You can conduct the process we’re about to share in a sprint, over the space of a week or two, or it can be something more gradual that you develop over time—over the course of a quarter, for example.

Consider your other business needs, and how you can (or already do) collect information from your target audience. Do you need to recruit research participants , or do you already have access to a user research group to help with this stage? The answer to this will help determine a realistic project timeline.

Lastly, let internal stakeholders know that the process of building buyer personas is not something that will see a return on investment (ROI) immediately for your business, it will also take time to realize.

Once you’ve mapped out your project timeline—including room to reap the results of implementing this valuable UX tool—you can begin your persona-building process. This process is broken down into three parts:

TL;DR 1. Phase one: User research This UX research phase includes identifying your research resources, curating the right questions, collecting and collating that information, then organizing it well.

2. Phase two: Persona mapping Once you’ve collected and organized your data, you can start to build your user personas. This phase includes identifying how many personas you need, which ones are most important to the growth of your product, further segmentation opportunities beyond the obvious, and how you’re presenting these personas so they’re actionable research tools for your team.

3. Phase three: Persona distribution Lastly, once you’ve got everything together, it’s time to put these personas out there! Building personas is not a one-time operation. Your personas are something that need to be continuously revisited, reiterated, and redistributed among your teams to ensure they’re still providing value.

That’s our overview. Now, let’s get into building these user personas.

1. Define your user research plan

First up, you’ll want to set the goals of your personas. What are your business problems right now, and how are user personas able to solve them? These goals will help keep you on track through every step that follows.

User persona goals will help determine the kind of information you need to collect and display.

You’ll probably want to take all your current data points and user research, and throw it out of the digital window. However, there’s no need to take such a strong approach—some of your data may be valid or recent enough to support this research phase.

Equip yourself with the data sets you need, or establish where you can find them, before you start to build your user personas. Doing the above should give you a good idea of the amount of personas you’ll need to do your product justice and encompass every type of user.

Lastly, identify where you’re able to conduct this research. What avenues do you have available? Now’s a good time to create a stellar user research plan .

Consider existing customers, potential customers and prospects, referrals, and user research groups for your research groups.

Maze for user researchers

Rapidly test anything from prototypes to copy, or round up user feedback—all in one place. Collect actionable insights across teams and create better user experiences, together.

2. Create questions to help map your personas

You’ll want to ask questions that truly showcase who your users are. We’re building archetypes, not stereotypes. Only rich questions are going to help flesh out your personas. Rich questions are questions that provoke thought, and generate in-depth qualitative responses you can spot trends in, build on, and learn from.

The top three things you want answering are:

• Who are they?
• What is their goal?
• What's their main barrier from reaching that goal?

Think of these three bulleted questions as chapters, and each will have its own subsections to help you further identify your personas.

Ash Oliver, UX Designer & Design Advocate at Maze stressed the importance of these questions to gather contextual data.

“We’re not our users, even if we’re adjacent to them. For example, I’m a designer, but I’m just one designer. Context helps frame your understanding. The more context we have, the broader picture we can illuminate. It helps us get a better understanding of what daily life looks like for users.”

Ash goes on to explain the importance of rich, open-ended questions over closed questions focusing on quantitative data: “They weave in storytelling, to better allow UX designers to step into the minds of those users and experience the product from their point of view.”

How you get those answers is determined by the rich questions you put together and how they enable you to segment. This is such a crucial stage of your user research that it’s deserving of its own chapter. Jump ahead to explore how to create a persona map and further benefits of undergoing this process.

Examples of rich questions are:

• What are you currently using to get your job done? Why is it no longer serving you?
• What other challenges are you facing in your role that you need help with?
• What’s your profession and responsibilities?

3. Send out your questions

It’s important that no matter where you’re delivering your user research questions, you’re delivering the same question set, so every user goes through the same experience. This way, their answers are less likely to hold experience bias.

For example, you can’t take the responses of an Instagram poll as having the same weight as those that have completed a ten-minute survey. When creating personas, the slightest divergence in survey experience can impact the overall accuracy of your data.

It’s a good idea to target users by setting up an invite to your user research survey on a popular page, either in-app with a product modal, or on your website with a banner or modal.

Lastly, look at other resources you have: email, social media, Slack communities, or recruiting participants from a SaaS business providing user testing opportunities. If you already have a participant group in the works, then consider Maze to help you manage this feedback step.

4. Segment your data and map your personas

You’ve now sent all of your questions and can start collecting, organizing, and segmenting this data! Next, you’ll want to build a knowledge base of sorts to help organize your user personas. By doing this, you’ll be able to identify trends and turn qualitative responses into quantitative data points to help flesh out multiple personas.

It may sound old school, but the best tool to do this is Google sheets or Excel. If you’re not a whizz with either, this may be a good time to level up, or find the talent to manage this for you.

Read through your data, and start segmenting answers based on trending keywords—they’ll be easy to highlight and group in Excel or Google Sheets. From there, you can start sorting answers into sub-groups of those groups—this will help your next step.

Persona mapping 🗺

Jump ahead to chapter three for an in-depth runthrough on mapping personas.

5. Clarify how many personas you need

Keep repeating the above process until you've covered the large trends. If you still have a lot of ungrouped information, consider ways you can further segment: look for micro-communities within larger communities.

Even if this information doesn’t aid design, it can prove useful for other areas of your business, like your product marketing efforts, customer success teams and sales.

By the end of this step, you’ll have a clear idea of how many user personas you need to cover all your data trends. Try not to leave anything ungrouped, as you could potentially be missing a new persona opportunity.

There’s no right or wrong answer for the number of personas you need. Most businesses tend to go for three–five, however, that’s not to say this needs to be the case for you.

6. Find or create a persona template that fits your needs

Your research should not be dictated by how you’re going to display it. That’s why we introduce this stage later in the process. If you’re already collecting and segmenting your data with a specific template in mind you’ll be biased to the information you choose to collect and how you give it preference.

Once you’ve got your data sorted, look for a user persona template that can help you showcase what you want to put out to your business, and which areas of each persona need spotlighting.

There are a lot of templates out there for marketing personas that you can tweak for your own purpose. Or, jump to chapter four to learn how to create a user persona template in-house.

Download our free persona template 📝

More on this in chapter four, but to help you get started, we've put together this user persona template that's free to use and ready to go. Take a look over on Figma.

7. Create your personas

Now comes the fun part: it’s time to start building out each user persona that perfectly encapsulates your target audience. Start doing this with a very low-fi frame of mind, just get a few ideas onto paper for those predetermined groups of data.

Don’t worry about putting names to them yet, you’re more so looking for grouping principles that relate to each other.

For example, note if those with the same job title also have the same job to be done, or the same stale way of doing their job. Perhaps within this group, you have two data sets, one that’s aware of your product or niche and already using competitive tech, and one that isn’t, and is doing their job manually.

Group your data together, then you can start adding your creative flair to bring these user personas to life.

Remember: personas are mostly data-driven, however, you’ll definitely need to add some creative freedom to bring these ICPs to life, and make them memorable.

8. Prioritize your personas

Identify the personas that provide the biggest opportunity for your business. Perhaps they're easy wins, or they're a particularly large customer cohort. This will help you prioritize your product backlog, and perhaps even inspire a new feature or two.

You’ll most likely walk away from this step with a primary persona that dominates your data. However, you’ll also have smaller user personas that can provide valuable insight and potentially highlight a new opportunity for your product marketing efforts.

In this step, consider your product team’s maturity, resources, and time. Prioritization may be limited by what you’re physically able to achieve in the near future, and what is more of a long-term goal.

9. Name and distribute your personas

Lastly, give your personas their names. It’s important to do this last so you're not tailoring information to fit a name or profile you have in mind. Alliterations help people remember who is who—for this, you can find their core problem or goal and place it in their name.

Take this step with a pinch of salt. It’s not uncommon for product teams today to agree that naming, gendering, assigning an image, and essentially stereotyping your personas does not lead to usable ones—they can even be damaging.

However, the argument is that some of these demographic labels help your team to remember and differentiate your user personas, getting everyone on the same page and keeping them there.

So, when it comes to naming and distribution of each ideal customer, do so in a way that enables your team, while allowing—not limiting—your user personas to still be able to do their job.

Ash Oliver, UX Designer & Design Advocate at Maze explains more.

“This is where the creativity of UX designers can shine, it’s where you push past the one-pagers, and think about how your personas can live on in a fluid state, rather than being static. We’re not thinking about personas with a start and end date. Your sharing process should be ongoing and not a one-time share.”

Ash goes on to explain how UX designers need to take all of their users into account when building personas, and this includes internal teams as users of their research.

“As a designer you have to think about who your internal users are, and how you can display your user persona data in a way that creates a positive learning experience. You can give on-going digestible artifacts like PDF one-page templates, but you also need to give people self-serve tools if they want to learn more.”

We asked Ash what else needs to be considered when sharing personas company-wide.

“Part of your distribution process needs to be around matching the ethos and culture of the company with your research, and the way you share this information. It’s important to know you’re not trying to create a new learning muscle or habit—stick to cultures your teams already know.

At Maze, we layer in artifacts with workshops, and create a diverse learning experience. The overarching theme of onboarding teams to new user personas leans heavily on traditional storytelling tactics—they make information memorable and sticky.”

Closing out user persona creation

That’s a wrap on building user personas that are truly capable of aiding your UX/UI design processes.

Remember, personas are supposed to be an accurate representation of potential real-life customers. It’s crucial you personify these target customers with rich data. Have your persona-building process lead with data, and let the rest follow from there.

Next up, we’re looking at developing persona data via persona mapping: a deep dive into the right questions to ask, how to group your personas, and the benefits of running through this design research process.

Frequently asked questions about creating user personas

What kinds of user personas are there?

There are four main types of user personas. The four types are:

User personas: Also known as design personas. These are personas that aid UX and UI design processes and product-build decisions.

Marketing personas: Also known as buyer personas. A buyer persona helps product marketing teams go to market.

Proto-personas: These are rapid personas built on gut instinct and common user knowledge a business has. They’re often relied on when you don’t have the time for anything more in-depth.

Persona spectrums: A much more inclusive approach to building user personas, spectrums accumulate research data but form a wider array of personas, rather than building one specifically—which could limit its usability.

What should be in a user persona?

Every user persona needs to answer the following three questions: Who are they? What is their goal? What's their main barrier from reaching that goal? After that, it’s down to your product and design goals as to what other information to include.

How can I create a user persona?

Creating personas can be done in nine steps:

• Identify research touchpoints
• Build user research questions
• Send out questions
• Collect and segment data
• Identify how many personas you need
• Lock down a persona template
• Create your user personas
• Prioritize your user or marketing personas
• Name and distribute your personas

Once you’ve gone through these nine steps, you’ll want to regularly test and validate your personas to know they’re still valuable to your product and business.

Mapping personas to drive better decisions

What Is a Persona? Everything You Need to Know

Perhaps you’re new to the world of UX and curious about user personas; maybe you’ve got some experience under your belt, but you’re looking for a refresher; or you may have heard some talk about “buyer personas” and you’re wondering what’s up. This guide will cover what personas are, four main types of personas, and how to get the most out of your user personas.

Personas are a commonly used tool among UXers—though they certainly exist outside of the design world. Personas help to make the end user, customer, or target market a bit more real to the people and teams in charge of serving, reaching out to, and designing for these people.

By gathering information about your users and transforming it into a set of fact-based profiles, you can represent the very real needs and goals of your users in personal and engaging ways and keep your user at the heart of every design decision you make.

This guide will cover:

• What are personas and why do they matter?

User personas vs. buyer personas

Proto-personas: good in a pinch, persona spectrums: design for inclusion.

• When and how to use personas
• Tips for how to get the most out of your personas
• How to create a user persona
• A final word

Ready to dive in? Let’s get started.

1. What are personas and why do they matter?

A persona is a profile. A character sketch. An approximation of a segment of your product users or target market. If you think of them in terms of archetypes , personas require you to look at who your users actually are (or the kinds of users you would like to focus on) and create a set of archetypes for the broad profile any one of your users might fit at any given time.

While there is some argument against the effectiveness of personas as a tool in UX design (mainly due to their common, but avoidable, pitfalls), the value of placing your users front and center is clear:

Personas generate empathy; and empathy is essential to the DNA of UX design. Personas allow you to look at a personal representation of your users and come to a better understanding of what your real users’ needs and goals look like in real moments of their lives.

No matter what kind of personas you choose to employ (more on that in a moment), if you’re making a focused and systematic effort to keep your users at the heart of every design decision you make, you’ll end up with a better product all around.

Personas are also helpful as your design team presents solutions to clients and stakeholders, telling users’ stories to keep them at the center of decision making.

2. Four main types of personas

There are four main types of personas that we’ll cover here—two in more detail than the rest: buyer personas (aka: marketing personas), user personas (aka: design personas), proto-personas, and persona spectrums.

Let’s start with the two most commonly confused: user personas and buyer personas.

User personas (also known as design personas) and buyer personas (also known as marketing personas) are widely discussed and easily confused. So we’ll break it down with a simple definition of each type and their primary similarities and differences.

Buyer personas are based on market research and information about your existing customers for the primary purpose of differentiating marketing efforts by market segment. The research and analysis that goes into shaping the details of a buyer persona are all geared toward understanding the role your product plays in buyers’ lives. The goal is to focus your messaging so that you are representing your product in an accurate and appealing fashion for your target market. Buyer personas can also help shape the broad direction of product development if they uncover any particular problems that the product could potentially solve for buyers.

User personas are based on user research and are designed for the primary purpose of cultivating empathy to influence the design process. The research and analysis that goes into these is similar to what goes into buyer personas in that you’ll examine your real or potential user base to understand who they are, how they accomplish specific tasks with your product, any situational factors that impact their experience, and how you might improve the products as a whole to make the entire experience as smooth, efficient, and delightful as possible.

Both persona types look at real or potential people who will experience your product or its messaging to varying degrees. You can use both types to discover ways to personalize, iterate, and improve on your existing product and marketing efforts.

The primary difference is that a buyer (marketing) persona is based on people who are buying the product and focuses primarily on improving the marketing efforts that reach these people; a user (design) persona is based on the people who are or will be actually using the product and focuses primarily on improving the design of the product itself.

If you’re a UXer, it can’t hurt to be familiar with marketing personas, but keep them separate from user personas—which you’ll likely work with a lot more than the other types.

Proto-personas are personas based on educated guesses about your user base. If your time and resources for user research are limited for whatever reason, this type of persona can be a quick and easy way to implement the tool. It could also be a good way to dip your toe into the waters of user personas.

This type of persona tends to slip much more easily into the aforementioned pitfalls, so we don’t recommend this as an ongoing or habitual approach.

Persona spectrums are receiving growing attention in the design industry as the field moves toward inclusion. Persona spectrums take a “typical” user and create iterations of that same persona across a spectrum of ability, identity, background, or experience to factor a wider range of user needs into the design process.

For example, you could set up one of your personas as having limited use of one arm either permanently (amputation or paralysis), temporarily (arm is in a cast), or situationally (they’re holding a cup of coffee or a child, etc.).

This approach is based on the idea that any one of your users might experience exclusion from your product at any given time for any number of reasons—why not design a solution to that problem? You’ll end up with more inclusive personas and products.

Note that for the rest of this guide, we’ll focus on user personas and persona spectrums as these are most applicable in the field of UX design.

3. When and how to use personas

No matter what kind of personas you’re building, your most important job is to ensure that your personas accurately represent your users needs and goals—especially in the context of the product or features you’re looking to improve. This happens through rigorous user research, which is at the heart of the first stage of the UX design process: Empathize.

User personas are both:

• A means of building empathy and defining user problems, and
• A result of the Empathize and Define stages of the UX design process

Build your personas during the Empathize stage of the UX design process. This is a great way to distill research findings and help you and your team to really solidify those insights and prepare to define the problems you’ll tackle in the remaining stages of the process. As you build them, you’ll naturally generate empathy and do some of the work of the Define stage as you begin to see patterns and notice things you may have missed in your initial research.

Having personas early in the design process will give you a solid foundation of understanding your users in more concrete terms and give you tools to generate empathy and understanding in your stakeholders. It’ll also give you a solid touchpoint to return to during subsequent stages of the design process.

Return to your personas in the Ideate stage of the design process: ask whether the ideas you’re coming up with really meet the needs and contexts represented by your personas. It may be that you come up with some really fantastic, exciting, shiny new ideas that you need to let go of or return to at a later date, because they don’t meet the needs of the moment. But chances are even greater that the parameters that your personas create will lead to some very original and relevant ideas that you and your team can tackle together.

4. Tips for how to get the most out of your personas

There are four common pitfalls when designers or design teams use personas. It’s important to acknowledge these pitfalls, but also to emphasize that these are problems that occur when personas are implemented incorrectly—and that you can avoid them quite easily!

Here are our tips for how to avoid each pitfall and make the most of this powerful tool.

Tip #1: Get buy-in from people outside the design team (as well). If you or your team are the little persona island in the company, personas will be naturally limited in their effectiveness.

Pitch personas to leadership and help them to see how personas can create a unified vision of who you’re serving, greater empathy for those users and their needs, and ultimately, a more cohesive and user-centered product experience.

And make personas a company-wide project! Involve people from every team, and especially leadership. Make it an engaging and meaningful experience! Allow everyone’s insights to shape the direction each persona takes.

Tip #2: Cultivate a better understanding of what personas are and what they do. Personas shouldn’t be created, used once, and set on a shelf or hung on a wall as a vague ideal or goal.

Help your colleagues understand what personas are, how they might factor into each team’s process, and what the results might look like. After you’ve got a set of personas set up for a project, actively involve them in meetings and workshops and coach other teams to do the same!

Tip #3: Create or re-create unique personas for every project. Personas are not one-size fits all. You’ll create a set of personas with a specific aspect of the product in mind. This focus will determine the kind of data you use, the teams you involve, and every detail of the personas you create. If you use the same set of personas for every project from now until the end of time, your personas could miss the mark.

With each new project comes a new set of problems to solve that will require different kinds of data and focus on different user needs and goals. Re-invent your personas with each new project’s goals in mind.

Tip #4: Broaden the scope of your personas and remember that they are merely archetypes. In reality, there is no “average” or “typical” user. Every human you’re designing for has a unique set of needs and goals, abilities, identity, and context/circumstances.

It’s impossible to focus your efforts on the needs and goals of every single person who might end up using your product, but if you’re not mindful in how you create your personas and what additional steps you take in the design process to minimize exclusion, your personas can limit your vision and ultimately the effectiveness of your product.

The best ways to steer clear of this pitfall? First, be sure to involve diverse users in your research and testing (in the creation of the data that will inform your personas), and diverse colleagues in the crafting of your personas. This will help your personas to include the needs and goals of users whose identities, experiences, abilities, and backgrounds fall outside of the assumed majority.

Another great way to keep your personas from limiting your vision is to expand the personas themselves into persona spectrums (more on these in a moment)

5. How to create a user persona

Whether you’re sticking with a traditional user persona or enriching that practice with persona spectrums, the starting point will always be user research. User research is your window into the worlds of the people who use your product; it’s where you’ll learn when and how they interact with your product, what that experience is like, and what factors you’ve overlooked that might impact that experience. This is where you discover ways to create better user experiences—which, for UXers, is kind of the point!

If you’d like to learn more about user research, CareerFoundry’s free UX Research for Beginners Course is a great place to start.

From there, you’ll work with your team to organize and interpret your findings into whatever deliverables (including personas!) you’ve decided will be most useful going forward.

Here’s our video guide on how to create a user persona:

6. A final word

Use them well, and personas have the power to transform users’ experiences with your product. Use them well, and you’ll learn more about your users and cultivate more empathy in your company than you might have thought possible.

If you’d like to learn more about the UX designer process and user personas, check out these articles:

• How to define a user persona
• User persona spectrums: What they are and how to use them
• How to build a customer journey map
• UX design career specializations you should explore

The Complete Guide to UX Personas

Published: November 07, 2023

If you're new to UX design, the first thing you should know how to do is create a UX persona. UX personas are one of the cornerstones of design, and they play a crucial role in helping you find design solutions and create user-friendly products and experiences your customers appreciate.

In this guide, you'll learn what a UX persona is, how to create one, and some tips you should keep in mind as you make a UX persona.

Table of Contents

• What is a UX Persona?

Why UX Personas Matter

How to create a ux persona, examples of ux personas, tips for creating a ux persona, what is a ux persona.

A UX persona is a semi-fictional character that represents the wants, needs, and traits of a subset of your target audience . These personas are based on an in-depth analysis of your actual customers and their behavioral patterns, background information, skills, goals, and problems.

In UX, personas help you identify key patterns and themes among your ideal customers, which makes it easy for you to empathize with your audience and make better product decisions.

A well-designed UX persona contains the following:

• A fictional name.
• An image (e.g., illustration, avatar, or photo) of the persona.
• A real quote that summarizes what the persona is most concerned with as it relates to your product.
• The demographic profile , including the persona’s age, gender, employment status, family status, and any other information that’s relevant to your product.
• Psychographics, including the persona’s attitudes, interests, pain points, and motivations.
• End goals (what the users want to accomplish by using your product).
• A scenario that details how a persona would interact with your product to achieve their goals. This scenario is usually written from the persona’s point of view and describes use cases for which they may need your product.

All this information is kept in an easily accessible document or presentation deck you can reference when you need to.

Pro tip: If you’re creating multiple UX personas to represent different user segments, you can assign each persona a tagline or label. This distinguishes between the different personas and succinctly indicates which user group each persona belongs to.

For instance, if you have two personas who have different shopping attitudes, you may tag them “The Thrifter” and “The Luxury Shopper,” respectively.

Maria Harutyunyan , the co-founder of Loopex Digital , uses UX personas to inform the strategies her teams execute in the business. On the importance of UX personas, Harutyunyan says, “UX personas matter as they represent the people we want to reach with our design. By getting to know their behaviors, desires, needs, and motivations, we can provide the best solutions for them.

“In SEO, especially, understanding our users allows us to create content and strategies that truly meet their unique needs. When we do this well, we see better user engagement, satisfaction, and, ultimately, more conversions.”

Harutyunyan goes on to give an example of a UX persona she used in her agency.

“While working on a project for a client selling eco-friendly products, we discovered through research that one of our key user groups was environmentally-conscious millennials,” says Harutyunyan. “So, we created a persona named ‘Eco-Friendly Emma,’ a 28-year-old urban dweller passionate about sustainable living. This persona helped guide our SEO strategy, ensuring the content we created resonated with users like Emma.”

When done well, UX personas can work for different kinds of businesses, including yours. Here are four reasons why you should use them.

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What are UX personas and what are they used for?

How can you use UX personas to better understand your target audience? Learn what UX personas are, what they’re used for and how to create your own.

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A UX persona is a fictional character which represents your target users. Personas are an extremely valuable UX tool, allowing you to better understand your target audience and make design decisions accordingly.

New to UX personas? Keep reading to learn more about what a UX persona is, what they’re used for, and how to create your own. 

Looking for something specific in this article? Click the below links to reach that content faster:

What is a UX persona?

What are personas used for in ux, what are the different types of personas in ux.

• UX persona examples
• How to create a persona to better understand your target audience

A persona is a fictional character which represents certain traits and qualities of real users. In UX, personas are an important tool for understanding and empathising with your target audience.

Personas are usually captured in a document or presentation deck, providing an easily digestible visualisation of your target user(s). Personas comprise a mixture of text and icons/graphics and you can also give them a face. For example, you might get a custom-drawn illustration or use a stock image.

Although personas are fictional, they should be based on facts and data about real users. This is obtained through user research and any behavioural data you may have gathered in relation to the product you’re designing.

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Typically, a UX persona includes:

• The persona’s name
• An image (e.g. an illustration, avatar, photo or stock image)
• Demographic information such as your persona’s age, gender, family/living situation, employment status and anything else that’s relevant to your product or problem space
• Their needs and goals in relation to your product
• A summary of their challenges, frustrations and pain points in relation to your product or problem space
• Quotes from real users whom the persona should represent

If you’re creating multiple UX personas to represent different segments of your user base, you can also assign each persona a tagline or label. This helps to distinguish between the different personas, make them memorable. It also clearly and succinctly capture which user group your persona represents. For example, if you create two UX personas who each have very different spending habits, you might dub them “The Spender” and “The Saver.” 

Personas in UX design are a great tool for building empathy and keeping the user at the centre of the design process. 

To create a persona, UX researchers and designers must pull out and capture the most important, valuable information they have about their users. In doing so, they’re compelled to step into the user’s shoes and dig deep into who they are and what they need. As such, the persona creation process alone fosters a deeper understanding of your target audience. 

Once you’ve created a UX persona (or personas), you’ve got a clear point of reference which you can turn to at any point in the design process . Personas will help you to make user-focused design decisions and to shape the overall direction of the product. You can (and should) always ask yourself: What would Persona X need or want here? What would be their preference? What would help them the most? 

At the same time, UX personas make it easier to communicate and share your user research findings with others (especially those outside of the design team). Anyone can glance at your personas and immediately understand who you’re designing for and why — making it easier to justify your design decisions and get buy-in from key stakeholders. 

Ultimately, UX personas:

• Capture your user research in a digestible, visual format
• Build user empathy and make sure the design process prioritises the target audience’s needs
• Steer, inform and justify design decisions
• Enable others to understand who you’re designing for

The type of UX persona(s) you create will depend on the resources you have available, as well as the specific purpose you want your persona(s) to serve. 

There are generally 3 different approaches you can take to creating a UX persona:

• The quick, lean “proto” method
• The qualitative method
• The statistical or mixed-method

We’ll explain these different approaches now. 

Proto personas

Proto personas are created rapidly, based on existing knowledge about the target audience. When creating proto personas, you don’t conduct any new user research. You use any research/data you’ve already got or rely on your own (and your team’s) guesses and assumptions. 

Proto personas tend to be created within the context of a workshop. They’re a good way to externalise and capture people’s implicit assumptions about the target audience — but, of course, the fact that they’re not informed by real data or research is a big drawback. 

Still, proto personas are a good option if you’re short on time and resources — and they’re a better alternative to having no personas at all. 

Qualitative personas

Qualitative personas are based on qualitative research (such as interviews), usually involving a small-medium sample of users. These are a step up from proto personas as they’re informed by real data. And, because they’re based on small-scale user research, you don’t need endless time and resources to create qualitative personas.

Statistical or mixed-method personas

Statistical personas are the most comprehensive and thorough UX persona type. They rely on both quantitative and qualitative research. Typically, they involve a much larger sample of users. 

To create statistical or mixed-method personas, you’ll first conduct qualitative research (much the same as with qualitative personas) to identify commonalities and themes that repeatedly come up. From there, you’ll create a survey to collect quantitative data from a much wider user sample in order to validate (or invalidate) your initial findings. 

Statistical personas are comprehensive but time-consuming, so they may not be an option for every team. 

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UX persona examples 

If you’re new to the topic of UX personas, it can be useful to see how other designers approach the task. Here are some UX persona examples to inspire you. 

Sneha Kulkarni’s Airbnb user persona

Sneha Kulkarni, an interaction designer, created a UX persona for Airbnb based on qualitative research. She conducted five user interviews and sourced additional data on Airbnb users. 

She ended up with UX persona Taylor, a business analyst based in San Francisco who loves cooking, being outdoors and tends to travel internationally three times a year. Taylor’s frustrations and pain points when using Airbnb include inaccurate images, language barriers between her and the Airbnb hosts and inconsistent cancellation policies. 

Image taken from Sneha Kulkarni’s portfolio website

Hanna Soleimanzadeh’s Just Eat UX personas

As part of her unsolicited redesign of the Just Eat platform , Hanna Soleimanzadeh created two UX personas. She used a mixed method approach; sending out an online survey which garnered 50 responses and conducting interviews with five Just Eat users. 

She came up with two UX personas: Rosie Ortiz and Lucas Mellor. Rosie is a single 27-year-old web developer who works from home and her main motivations in relation to ordering takeaway are wellness, convenience and dietary needs. 

Lucas is a single 31-year-old content manager. His main goals are to enjoy a healthy diet and lifestyle while working from home, and to have all the information he needs to be able to find and order healthy takeaway meals. 

Image taken from Hanna Soleimanzadeh’s portfolio website

For more UX persona examples, check out:

• 4 UX persona examples on the UXPin blog
• 5 User persona examples on the UserGuiding blog

You’ll also find some UX persona examples in our selection of the best UX portfolios —   check them out here .

How to create a UX persona to better understand your target audience

Like most things in UX, creating personas is an iterative process. You’ll generally create them early on in the design process and then update and evolve them as you gather new insights. 

Here are the main steps you’ll need to follow to create a UX persona:

1. Choose your approach

First, consider the time and resources you have available. Ideally, you’ll conduct at least small-scale qualitative research so you can base your UX personas on real user data. However, if you need to create personas rapidly and have limited resources, you can start with the lean “proto persona” method. 

2. Conduct user research (or gather existing insights)

Your next step depends on whether you’re conducting user research or following the proto method. 

If you’re going with the former, the next step is to plan and execute your user research . This involves recruiting participants, creating surveys and preparing interview questions, depending on your chosen approach.

For the proto persona method, you’ll need to plan a workshop with all key stakeholders whose insights you want to utilise. For maximum efficiency, incorporate the persona creation process into the workshop too, getting everybody to mock up their own personas and then bringing them together for a final version. 

3. Synthesise your research

If you’ve conducted user research, you’re now going to analyse it. The goal is to find patterns and commonalities which allow you to identify different types of users. And, when we talk about different types of users, we’re mainly referring to user behaviours — i.e. how different user types behave and interact with your product or problem space. 

4. Bring your UX persona to life

Now it’s time to turn your findings into a tangible UX persona. To start with, mock up a template outlining the general shape that your UX persona will take, as well as the key information you want to include. Here are some resources you can use for guidance:

• 5 Essentials for your user persona template (with examples)
• 30 Must-see user persona templates
• 18 Free user persona templates

With your template in place, start filling it out to bring your UX persona to life. Remember to add an image and give your UX persona a name—this will help to make them memorable and relatable. 

5. Share and utilise your UX persona(s) 

Once you’re happy with your UX persona (or personas), it’s important to make sure you leverage their full potential. Don’t keep them for yourself; share them with the wider company (or a selection of department reps) so that others can get to know and understand them. 

Refer back to your UX personas throughout your design process and involve them in discussions about the direction of the product. Get in the habit of asking yourself – every step of the way – what would be most beneficial for your user personas? UX personas are an extremely valuable tool for putting the user first and creating products that actually meet your users’ needs, so don’t forget them.

We’ve explored the importance of UX personas for centring the user in the design process. If you’re curious about how to balance user needs against business goals, continue with this article . 

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• Research + Insights
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• User Persona Examples, Tips and Tools [2024 Guide]

User Persona Examples, Tips and Tools

Learn about the smart UX tool that makes user-friendly design possible with simple techniques and industry-specific examples

Introduction to User Personas

What is a user persona.

User Personas are realistic models of the people you are trying to help. They often take the form of a 1-page character study, and include a name, photo, personal details and specific goals. They come in many shapes and sizes, and are built from direct and indirect observation of real or potential users.

Three Principles of User Personas

• Specificity: Models a single person who stands for many
• Personality: Provides enough detail to create a character
• Authenticity: Derived from observations and real experiences

Profile-Style User Personas (pictured below) provide a familiar format that is easy to compare and share internally and among stakeholders. They can include a range of relevant data points depending on the space, and are often reserved for the “high-fidelity” stage of development.

Why are User Personas important?

Personas are the center of user-centered design. Without user personas, it would be difficult or impossible to design solutions that remain friendly from every perspective. From aligning teams to defining solutions, personas play an integral role in every design solution.

Five Benefits of User Personas for Business

• Provides common language for discussing users internally
• Maintains user-centered mindset throughout design and development
• Captures the breadth and depth of support opportunities
• Empowers rapid alignment when making early design decisions
• Contributes insights to other business units and product-related efforts

The evolution of User Personas

Personas as a design tool were created in the late 1980s by software developers who wanted to bridge the gap between users and developers. In doing so, they created the “user persona” as a modelling tool, which has continued to evolve alongside new technologies and development methodologies. [1]

Are User Personas the same as Market Segments?

User Personas can look similar to market/customer segmentation but they serve very different purposes. Whereas market segments help teams find new customers, User Personas help teams build new experiences. Teams need to do both to launch a successful project, and segmentation results are a valuable source of information for UX Researchers looking to study future users.

User Persona Structure

User personas are designed to quickly convey a shared set of user needs to design teams. They include a mix of text and visuals and are arranged in a variety of formats. While there is no right way to structure a user persona, teams should select a fidelity that reflects their stage in the design process.

Prototype vs Qualitative Personas

Prototype personas help teams collate their collective experiences and assumptions about users early in the design process. In effect, they are the “best guesses” of the design team, and contain many unvalidated assumptions and principle-based decisions. In contrast, qualitative personas have been derived from direct observations of current/potential users, and provide detailed ethnographic insights.

In practice, UX design projects are the most efficient when they begin with prototype personas that capture the team’s collective understanding. These prototypes help teams align quickly and identify areas of research and design exploration. In reality, prototype and qualitative personas exist on a spectrum, and as prototypes gain fidelity they become increasingly qualitative.

Six parts of a user persona

While there are many different ways to structure and inform team members about user perspectives, including the following elements will ensure you cover all the action items needed.

1. Photo/Mood Board Persona photos are powerful empathy builders and help teams discuss user experiences more accurately. While illustrations or stock photos suffice for early persona development (i.e. before user interviews or research), the best User Persona photos are everyday portraits of the people you’ve observed.

2. Personal Details Age, education and geographic location are often useful attributes for designers trying to empathize with their users, but not always. Aim to only include data points that are both defensible (i.e. grounded in observations or statistics) and relevant to the experience. For example, factors like devices, tech exposure and preferred browser are often more informative than income.

3. Description Include 2-3 sentences that capture the user’s environment and domain knowledge while avoiding long-winded narratives that aren’t based on experience.

4. Patterns & Behaviors This section is critical for user friendly design. Insights captured in this section are best when based on pooled observations of actual users, but can be prototyped using collective experience. Start by outlining the relevant activities, attitudes and aptitudes of your user.

5. Goals + Motivations Clearly articulating the intention of your users is a major difference between user/ux personas and other marketing or customer profiles. Comprehensive user personas address all three levels of user goals: Life goals (want to be), End goals (want to do) and Experience goals (want to feel).

6. Quote Giving personas a voice can help design teams communicate with them more effectively. The most useful quotes are usually verbatims captured in research settings or indirect channels (ex. customer service conversations, social interactions).

If direct quotes are available, for example when creating prototype personas, teams can consider “favorite quotes” instead, leveraging resources like brainyquote.com to find inspiring people and prose.

User Persona Types

Primary, secondary, customer and served personas.

To help prioritize design team efforts, user personas are classified into four types. In general, the number of user personas that a team creates should not be more than they can remember.

• Primary user personas are the main targets of experience design. Teams typically align on 2-4 primary personas, where each is distinct from the rest of the set. For example, a ride-sharing app would segment primary personas between riders and drivers, as their goals are connected but contrasting. For an in-car entertainment experience, primary personas may differentiate drivers and passengers.
• A secondary user persona is mostly satisfied with the requirements of the primary personas, but not entirely. In the ride-sharing app example, secondary personas may be those who want to coordinate moving large groups, such as organizations or HR departments. If your team has more than 4 secondary personas, you may want to reconsider the scope of the project or the segmentation of primary personas.
• Often the people who purchase a solution are not the ones who will use it. This buyer group is captured in a customer persona , which is generally considered a secondary persona to be mindful of (unless they require an admin interface for example, in which case they could be primary as well).
• Served personas are not users of the solution, but they are the ones it is used on. For example, an MRI patient doesn’t use the machine interface, but they are served but its design. Served personas are treated like secondary personas, and they provide a way to consider the broader impact of design decisions.

User Persona Examples

The following User Persona examples demonstrate the range of information that profiles can provide. Each can be considered as a starting point for persona development: In practice, teams often create basic profiles such as these to help identify users to interview. As research progresses, so does the fidelity of the personas.

User Persona Examples for Banking

One of the most interesting aspects of designing banking experiences is that they must be user-friendly to people of all ages and walks of life . This is where observation-based User Personas are most powerful.

As an example, consider the following two prototype personas: ETF Ellen and Trader Tim. These personas have been segmented based on generic investing behaviors, and could be used as a starting point for discussing potential users as a team.

Note that while demographic factors like age, assets, mortgages and marital status are also important, it’s likely that personas defined by risk tolerance, investing activity or other behaviors would prove more actionable.

User Persona Examples for Automotive

The path to purchase/lease is vehicle can take years and includes countless impressions and micro-events. Because of this, marketing/funnel-based segmentation is often applied to help teams find potential buyers. While necessary, knowing that someone is ready to consider a new vehicle won’t describe the experience they’re looking for. For that, you need User Personas.

Consider the following two prototype UX personas: Commuter Kate and Weekends Will. These personas have been segmented based on transit patterns, and could be used for exploratory Design Thinking brainstorms before being updated with more solution-specific insights.

User Persona Examples for Insurance

Like banking, insurance deals with a lot of sensitive user data — something that in the past has been notoriously difficult to design enjoyable experiences for. This has led to solutions that succeed in function, but fall short of friendly.

Fortunately, today’s integrated Design Thinking process has removed the technology bottlenecks, allowing teams to focus more attention on the experience. The following persona examples are from opposite ends of the insurance spectrum: First-time buyers and retired downsizers. As with all examples, these are merely a starting point for conversations, and would be updated to reflect direct observations.

How to Create a User Persona

Creating a user persona is a team exercise that requires empathy, analytical thinking and the frequent challenging of assumptions. The most inspiring User Personas provide a range of insights from user interviews, usability testing and other qualitative UX Research methods .

Regardless of the fidelity of the persona you are creating, the same 5-step process can be applied. This section will examine each step of the process in more detail.

How to Create a User Persona in 5 Steps

Sort users strategically, research the real experience, map patterns and primary goals, combine insights into a first draft, validate user personas as a team.

The first step in creating a user persona is find out what user persona you want to create. While it sounds simple enough (“The Customer!”), it’s where design teams often go wrong. This is because, in order to know what persona you want to create, you need to appreciate where they will stand in relation to all of your users. A user persona never exists in isolation, and trying to paint all of your users with a single brush is sure to end in compromise.

For experience designers, dividing users by their roles, goals or behaviors is much more informative than demographic or channel-based market segmentation.

Below are just a few of the ways you could divide a coffee shop’s customers .

• By role: The Commuter, The Writer, The Producer, The Road Tripper
• By goal: Start, Meet, Focus, Eat, Give, Work, Use The Bathroom
• By behavior: Every Day, On Weekends, On the Run, On Occasion

There is no “right way” to determine your initial groups, as long as they reflect the needs of your design team. For example, if you were redesigning a location’s interior, goals may be more helpful. If designing a loyalty service, behaviors may be most useful.

Note: Dividing users by their roles is often useful in enterprise solutions where job titles provide a lot of behavioral consistency. When it comes to consumer-facing projects though, roles become tricky: Real people have several roles at any given time, and trying to select just one risks oversimplifying.

When you know what segment your persona will represent, you can immerse yourself in their perspective. In essence, the goal of step two is to build a database of relevant insights that are inherent to the segment. There is an array of quantitative and qualitative ux research methods that can be used, with interviews and surveys among the most powerful.

User persona interviews

Interviewing multiple people that meet your criteria is the gold standard for user research, and the best way to generate the details that inspire big ideas. Depending on the opportunity, interviews can be supplemented with a variety of UX research methods such as surveys, diary/photo studies, touchstone tours, usability labs and personal inventories.

Tips for more insightful user interviews

• Conduct environmental interviews where the interaction occurs
• Assume the role of the apprentice and not the domain expert
• Avoid closed-ended questions that can be answered with a yes/no
• Avoid making the user a designer on the spot
• Encourage storytelling and analogies
• Ask users to show you what they mean
• Organize insights while the conversation is still fresh

User Persona Surveys

Surveys are an especially powerful ux research method because they can provide statistically significant insights about demographics, behaviors and goals. This makes it easier to create authentic identities and rank priorities as a team. Tools such as Typeform and Survey Monkey make distributing surveys simple — although designing the right questions still takes considerable effort.

After conducting user surveys, interviews and other UX research methods, you are ready to cluster insights and identify important patterns. Common clustering methods use one- or two-dimensional visualizations to segment data based on relevant variables, such as the frequency (quantitative) or intent (qualitative).

For example, clustering may help identify differences between people who use your product daily vs those using it less often. By examining these two clusters in detail, UX teams can determine if distinct personas are needed to avoid compromising the experience of each.

How will I know when I’m ready? When you can confidently list the most relevant behaviors and goals for each of your user segments, you are ready to move to the next step.

With clear segments, shared behaviors, and a selection of quantitative and qualitative insights to draw from, it’s time to draft the persona. You can begin with a user persona template that reflects the level of fidelity you’re going for, or create one of your own. When creating your own, be sure to consider the six parts of UX personas outlined in the section above.

When you’ve completed this step and captured the most relevant insights and attributes in a your user persona, it’s time to review and revise it as a team.

Three UX Persona watch-outs

• Avoid excessive fictional descriptions. Include just enough for empathy
• Avoid introducing solutions in your narrative — focus on pain points instead
• Avoid ranges for personal details — real people don’t have 1.5 children

Given the significant influence of user personas on every downstream design decision, it’s critical to take time refining draft personas as a team. This process is often completed in design thinking workshops, using creative tools like the gallery walks or role playing to bring different perspectives together.

User Persona Tips

Testing user personas: exit interview.

A revealing way to test the veracity of user personas is to see how your team members answer interview questions on their behalf. While you can expect a lot of divergence here, the clarity gained in this step can pay significant dividends.

Consider the following questions as a starting point for creating your own exit interviews. Feel free to get creative with your line of questions, and reformat them as needed to suit the various collection methods (i.e. surveys vs gallery walk vs live discussion).

System-oriented

• What do you use most often?
• What are your favorite shortcuts?
• What aspects drive you crazy?
• Who do you turn to for help?
• How do you work around issues?

Goal-oriented

• What makes a good day? Bad day?
• What is currently wasting your time?
• What is your top priority? Second?
• What helps you make decisions?
• What are you doing next?

Workflow-oriented

• How did you start work today?
• What is a typical day?
• How often do you do this?
• What slows you down?
• What do you do daily? Monthly?

Attitude-oriented

• What does success look like to you?
• What do you enjoy most about work?
• What do you procrastinate on?
• What do you prefer to tackle first?

If answering those questions was different, or if it yielded very different results for members of your team, you may need to revisit your research notes or revise segmentation.

Introduce persona early and often

Once you’ve developed your persona, make a point to introduce them at the start of every design project and revisit them continuously throughout the process. When new members join your team, be sure to give them the same introduction as you would when first presenting them, otherwise they will start to fade as projects progress.

Save your personas a seat at lunch

Customer obsessed teams will often take their personas one step further, bringing them into the daily office life by creating visual reminders in high-traffic areas. While it may sound silly, this simple tip will do more to align teams on who they’re working for than you’d expect.

Give your personas their own social account

If you want to take your user personas to the next level, you can even consider giving them an email address and social media profile. Furnishing their profiles with the types of posts they would share will bring a new level of realism than ever before. Plus, it’s easy to add them to your own account and share updates — including reactions to breaking news — over time.

• Cooper A, Reimann R, Cronin D, Noessel C. About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design. John Wiley & Sons; 2014.

How to Create User Personas Step by Step: A 2024 Guide

Imagine designing a product without understanding your users. Sounds like a recipe for disaster, doesn't it? 

That's where user personas come in. Based on real user data, these fictional characters ensure your design decisions are user-centered and empathetic.

In this blog post, we'll guide you through the role of user personas in design, the different types of personas, a 7-step process to create them, and how they should evolve over time. 

The role of user personas in design

User personas are essential to creating a strong product design. They help us gain more insight into our target audience and influence our design decisions. 

By creating personas, you can build empathy with users and align your design team and stakeholders around a shared understanding of user needs and behaviors. 

In turn, this ensures your design is user-centered and relevant to your audience.

Personas are more than just pretty faces; they represent the most important user groups of your product, allowing you to focus on their pain points, needs, and preferences. 

They can also bring user research findings to life, ensuring your design decisions are grounded in real data and not just gut feelings.

Let's dive deeper into the three main benefits of UX personas: building empathy, user-centered decision-making, and aligning teams and stakeholders.

If you'd rather jump right into collecting user data, check out this user activation survey template :

Building empathy with users

A realistic character, based on actual user research, helps designers better understand and empathize with their target audience. By creating a persona, you can visualize your users, humanize them , and bring their needs to the forefront of your design process. 

This deeper understanding of users ensures your product resonates with your audience and addresses their pain points.

But it's not just about having a realistic character; it's also about the details. 

In a UX persona, the personal background should include details like age, gender, ethnicity, education, persona group, and family status. 

These demographic details, along with the user's psychographic profile, provide a comprehensive understanding of why users act the way they do and, ultimately, why they use your product.

User-centered decision making

The ultimate aim of a user persona is to identify the driving force that encourages action, answering the question: what do users need or want to achieve with your product? 

By focusing on user personas, you can prioritize which features and improvements will have the most impact on your users. This ensures your design decisions are user-centered and your product remains relevant and aligned with their needs.

Persona documentation should include scenarios written from the persona's point of view, describing use cases that are likely to occur. Scenarios help you understand how someone would use your product in a particular context to reach their goals. 

This user-centered approach to decision-making helps strike a balance between meeting the needs of the business and the needs of the users, ultimately leading to a harmonious solution.

Aligning teams and stakeholders

Aligning teams and stakeholders is crucial for creating agreement, enhancing collaboration, and boosting employee satisfaction and retention within a company. UX personas play a significant role in achieving this alignment. 

Sharing personas with stakeholders ensures everyone involved has a clear understanding of the user's needs and expectations, fostering a unified approach to the design process.

Types of user personas

There are three main types of user personas: proto personas, qualitative personas, and mixed-method personas. 

Proto personas are based on assumptions rather than research, providing a quick starting point for evaluating ideas and early design hypotheses.

Qualitative personas are created through limited research, such as interviews or focus groups, to understand users' wants, expectations, and needs. 

Mixed-method personas combine both qualitative and quantitative research , offering a more comprehensive understanding of your audience.

Let's explore each type in more detail.

Proto personas

Proto personas are descriptions of your target users and audience based on the assumptions of stakeholders. They differ from standard personas as they rely on assumptions rather than extensive research data. 

While this approach is less resource-intensive, it still provides a valuable starting point for evaluating ideas and early design hypotheses.

However, relying solely on assumptions can lead to flawed personas. Ensure you make space for validation of these assumptions in your user research process whenever possible. 

Qualitative personas

Qualitative personas are based on limited user research, such as interviews or focus groups, to gain insights into users' motivations, expectations, and needs. 

While qualitative research doesn't provide the same level of depth as mixed-method research, it still offers valuable insights for creating more detailed and accurate personas.

One downside to this approach is the time and resources needed to conduct the research, as well as the potential for bias in the data.

Mixed-method personas

Mixed-method personas are the gold standard when it comes to creating user personas. They combine both qualitative and quantitative research methods, offering a more comprehensive perspective of your users. 

This approach helps you better understand their needs, motivations, and behaviors, allowing you to create more tailored user experiences.

Examples of mixed-method persona creation include survey data, user interviews, and segmentation analysis. 

I strongly advocate using a mixed-method approach when developing user personas. This approach will help reduce bias, increase validity, and capture a more accurate and holistic understanding of your personas than just proto-personas, which are based on assumptions, or purely qualitative personas.

Kasia Jordan-Kaźmierczak, User Researcher at Survicate

Surveys offer an easy and effective way to collect both qualitative and quantitative data about your users. A good survey tool will not only provide you with user survey templates but also analyze the responses as they come in:

Crafting effective user personas in 7 steps

Creating effective user personas may seem challenging, but with the right approach, it becomes a manageable and rewarding process. 

Following our 7-step plan will help you create personas that truly represent your users and inform your design decisions.

Understanding the purpose

Before diving into the creation process, it's essential to understand the purpose of user personas. They help designers get a better understanding of the end users, allowing them to better meet their needs, experiences, behaviors, and goals.

By focusing on the purpose, you can ensure your user personas are valuable assets in guiding your design decisions and shaping your product's direction.

Conducting user research

User research is a critical step in creating user personas. It involves gathering data on your target audience through various methods such as interviews, surveys , and focus groups. 

This research helps you identify trends, patterns, and user needs, which in turn inform your personas. 

Without user research, your personas may be based on assumptions and stereotypes, leading to poor design decisions.

To create accurate and effective user personas, it's crucial to use real data from real users. Collecting quantitative data, such as demographics and usage statistics, along with qualitative data, such as responses to user surveys or interviews, ensures your personas are grounded in actual user behavior and needs. 

This research phase sets the foundation for creating personas that truly represent your users and inform your design decisions.

Analyzing and identifying patterns

Once you have collected your user research data, the next step is to analyze and identify patterns. This involves looking for commonalities and trends among your users to understand their motivations, expectations, and needs.

Identifying patterns allows you to segment your users into groups, enabling you to create user personas that represent the most important user groups of your product. 

Recognizing these patterns helps ensure your design decisions are focused on the user and guided by actual user behavior.

Watch the video below to learn how to look for similarities in various attributes when creating user personas:

Developing persona profiles

With your user research analyzed and patterns identified, it's time to develop persona profiles. 

These profiles should include personal and professional background information, user environment, and psychographics. 

By incorporating these details into your personas, you provide a comprehensive understanding of your users and their needs.

Selecting images and names

Choosing the right images and names for your user personas is crucial. Images help bring your personas to life and make them more relatable, while names provide a memorable identity. 

When selecting images and names, consider the cultural implications and ensure they accurately represent your target users.

Crafting scenarios and narratives

Scenarios and narratives play an essential role in UX personas, helping designers understand how users interact with the product in various situations. 

Crafting effective scenarios involves considering the user's goals, motivations, and challenges, as well as their environment, device, and emotions.

By providing a detailed context of how users interact with your product, scenarios and narratives bring your personas to life and ensure they remain relevant and user-centered.

Ensuring consistency and relevance

To make sure your UX personas remain consistent and relevant, create a style guide outlining the tone, voice, and language to use when creating content. 

Additionally, establish a content review process to ensure all content is accurate, up-to-date, and tailored to your target audience.

Maintaining consistency and relevance in your user personas ensures they accurately represent your users and continue to inform your design decisions as user needs evolve.

The one tip I would give you if you're creating user personas is to ask yourself: how is this useful? While there are hundreds of ready-to-use templates available that can suggest which information to collect, it is important to consider whether it all really applies to your company and its reality. So, be clear about your goals and focus on understanding things that can really make a difference.

Updating user personas over time

User personas are not set in stone. As user needs and behaviors change, it's essential to update your personas with fresh insights and adapt them accordingly.

In this section, we'll explore the iterative process of updating personas, incorporating new insights, and adapting to changing user needs.

Iterative process

An iterative process in UX design involves continuously improving and refining your product based on user feedback and testing. This approach speeds up the design process, enhances usability, and ultimately leads to an improved user experience.

By applying an iterative process to your UX personas, you can keep them up-to-date with changing user needs and ensure they continue to inform your design decisions.

Incorporating new insights

As you gather new insights through user research, it's essential to incorporate them into your user personas. 

By doing so, you’ll ensure that they accurately represent your users and their changing needs, leading to smarter design choices and a superior user experience.

Adapting to changing user needs

By continuously updating your personas with new insights and trends, you ensure your product remains relevant and useful for your users as their needs evolve. This boosts user satisfaction, loyalty , and adoption of new features.

Build reliable user personas with surveys

UX personas play a vital role in the design process, providing insights into user needs, motivations, and behaviors. 

By creating and evolving UX personas, you can build empathy, make user-centered decisions, and align your team and stakeholders around a shared understanding of your users. 

Whether you're using proto personas, qualitative personas, or mixed-method personas, you can collect valuable user data with surveys. 

Survicate offers a number of ready-to-send user survey templates that you can customize to suit your needs, including by adding your branding elements, or even translating into different languages. 

Connect to third-party tools via native integrations and keep track of the answers in a dedicated dashboard, where you'll find a response breakdown and a word cloud. Simply sign up and start sending surveys that your users will love to fill in!

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User Personas: The Complete Guide for UX Designers (With Examples)

Imagine this: You land on a beautifully designed webpage. The site’s information is accessible, credible, desirable, findable, valuable, usable, and useful. Congratulations! You just encountered a site designed perfectly for the UX persona — ahem, you! Keep reading to learn all about UX personas and how UX designers can use them to create human-focused, audience-friendly designs.

UX personas play a significant yet conflicting role in the  UX design process . Some product developers believe that personas are essential in building a great user experience. Others find them to be nothing more than time-consuming distractions that don’t contribute anything meaningful to the design process.

Since user personas are fictional and abstract, their efficacy depends on how UX designers develop and use them. If they are data-driven and based on real users, personas can make websites 2-5 times easier to navigate and increase website traffic by up to 210%, according to HubSpot .

But if designers create them based on personal assumptions (quick tip: don’t make personal assumptions), they can be a waste of time — hence the conflicting opinions.

So, what exactly is a UX persona? And do they help or hinder the development of successful digital products? Let’s take a closer look at UX personas and how designers use them to create user-focused products.

In This Guide

What Are User Personas?

• What’s Included In a User Persona?
• User Persona vs. Buyer Personas

Different Types of User Personas

User persona examples that drive results, how to create a successful ux persona: step-by-step guide.

• Learn to Create Effective UX Personas

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Before we go any further, it’s time that we address the corgi in the room… what are user personas?

User personas (also called UX personas) are models that represent the different types of users who might interact with a product or service. They usually include information like demographics, behavior patterns, motivations, and goals.

User personas help designers to understand the needs and expectations of their ideal customer. By creating a user persona, designers can ensure they are making decisions that will serve the needs of their target users.

Creating user personas early in the design process helps to prevent design bias by providing a framework for making design decisions, speeding up the overall design process.

When used properly, a good user persona can be an invaluable tool for designing successful products, creating value propositions, and marketing to specific user groups.

(Back to top.)

What’s Included In a User Persona?

Typically, a UX persona includes:

• The persona’s name
• An avatar (image, stock photo, or illustration)
• Demographic information (location, age, gender, occupation, and anything relevant to your product)
• Marital status
• Behavior patterns (how the persona uses your product, their goals, and motivations)
• A quote that sums up the persona’s needs or feelings

If you are creating personas for several different potential customers, it can be helpful to create a template that includes all of the necessary information. Then, create a label for each persona with their name and avatar.

For example, when developing two user personas with distinct spending habits, you might refer to them as “The Spender” and “The Saver.”

User Personas vs. Buyer Personas

You wouldn’t confuse Twitter for LinkedIn, right? If you’re using them for their intended purpose, the two social networks have very different functions in our everyday life. So, why shouldn’t there be a distinction between the terms “user persona” and “buyer persona”?

In the world of marketing and user experience, user persona and buyer persona are sometimes used interchangeably. But there is a crucial distinction between the two.

A user persona is a fictional representation of a group of users with similar characteristics, whereas a buyer persona is a specific type of user persona that focuses on the characteristics of those who are most likely to make a purchase.

Buyer personas are mostly focused on demographics, while user personas encompass a broader range of information.

In other words, all buyer personas are user personas, but not all user personas are buyer personas.

There are three different types of user personas commonly used in design thinking:

• Lightweight (Proto) Personas : Best for early-stage design when limited data is available.
• Qualitative Personas : Best for when more data is available, and you want to dive deeper into user needs and motivations.
• Statistical (Mixed-Method) Personas : Best for creating complex personas with large amounts of data.

Lightweight (Proto) Personas

Proto personas are slimmed-down versions of ad-hoc personas that don’t require any new research. They document the team’s existing understanding (or best predictions) of who their users are and what they desire.

UX designers can develop proto personas based on existing user data if the organization has any. But in most cases, they’re only based on the team’s theories about who the users might be and what they require.

Created mostly during workshops, these made-up personas are a useful way of defining people’s unstated assumptions about their target audience. They work best for groups using a lean UX methodology or those who would have otherwise avoided using personas altogether.

Of course, the fact that they aren’t informed by genuine data or real people is a major shortcoming. And if the team decides that they have little value, it can have a detrimental  halo effect on other UX collaborative efforts — and personas in general.

Qualitative Personas

The ideal approach for most UX teams is to conduct exploratory research (e.g., user interviews, role-based studies) in small sample sizes to generate qualitative data. Segmenting these findings by common characteristics (e.g., shared attitudes, behaviors, and expectations from using the product) can produce reliable quantitative data that designers can use to build personas.

This approach requires more effort than lightweight personas, but it pays off handsomely in design quality and team alignment. Because qualitative personas are based on real data from real users, they help design teams empathize with their target audience more.

They are also much more detailed and nuanced, making them valuable tools for driving strategic, user-centric product decisions. And since they require small sample sizes and limited resources, they’re relatively easy and low-risk to produce.

Statistical (Mixed-Method) Personas

Product teams develop statistical personas based on both quantitative and qualitative research. Since they require more data to build, they are usually reserved for larger organizations with well-established user research functions.

Statistical personas go beyond demographics and include both behavior (e.g., how often they use the product) and attitudinal data (e.g., what they think about using the product). This data is then used to develop predictive models of how users will interact with the product.

The advantage of statistical personas is that they can be used to generate high-level, actionable insights about the end users. For example, UX research might reveal that a certain group of users is more likely to churn than others. The team can then use this information to develop strategies for retaining these users.

Because of how complex they are to create, statistical personas are expensive and labor-intensive to create. They also require a high degree of expertise to develop and interpret. They are not well suited for small design teams or those with limited resources.

Whoah! That was a lot of information! Let’s recap, shall we?

• User personas allow UX designers to create human-focused designs.
• Demographics, motivations, and pain points are all data points that a UX designer may collect to create a user persona.
• User personas are NOT the same as buyer personas.
• There are THREE different types of user personas: lightweight, qualitative, and statistical.

Got it? Good! Let’s continue because this is where the fun begins. Let’s see how you can put all this information to good use!

Words < Actions

Here at Skillcrush, we like to walk the walk. That is why we’ve compiled a handful of your favorite, real-life user persona examples. Take a look and let us know how you’d adjust the UX design for the user persona.

Taylor Carter: Airbnb’s User Persona

After conducting five user interviews and researching data on Airbnb users, Sneha Kulkarni, a user interface designer, created a UX persona for Airbnb named “Taylor.”

Source: Sneha Kulkarni Portfolio

Taylor is a 26-year-old Business Analyst who lives in San Francisco. She loves cooking, traveling, and outdoor recreational activities. She also travels internationally three times per year.

While she enjoys using Airbnb, inaccurate images of houses or apartments listed on the site and language barriers between her and potential hosts are pain points for her. She also frequently runs into issues with cancellation policies that are either too strict or not strict enough.

This user persona was created to help the Airbnb team design user-oriented features that improve the experience for users like Taylor. For example, they might work on improving the quality of images listed on the site or developing a way to match potential guests with hosts who speak their language.

Rosie Ortiz and Lucas Mellor: Just Eat’s User Personas

Hanna Soleimanzadeh created two UX persona examples for her sample redesign of the Just Eat platform. She used a statistical approach, sending out an online poll with 50 respondents and talking to five Just Eat users in-person to capture their day-to-day experiences.

She created two separate personas based on her research: Rosie Ortiz and Lucas Mellor.

Source: Hanna Soleimanzadeh Portfolio

Like many of us, Rosie has worked remotely as a web developer since COVID-19 started. She is a single, 27-year-old, who prioritizes health and fitness. She orders takeout 2-3 times weekly but has issues finding pictures of the food she’s ordering. She also can’t find dietary information for each dish. Since her diet is a priority to her, the lack of customization options also bothers her.

Lucas is a tech-savvy content manager who lives alone and works remotely. He doesn’t like to cook, but he prioritizes his health and fitness. He wants to order takeout that is healthy and affordable, but there is no section on the Just Eat platform that highlights healthy options. And without images or descriptions, finding adequate information about each dish is confusing.

Both of these personas were created to redesign the Just Eat platform to be more user-friendly. By highlighting each persona’s personality traits and motivations, the team can design a platform that is tailored to the pain points of users like Rosie and Lucas.

Now you didn’t think we’d just give you a few examples and expect you to understand how to create a UX persona, did you?

To create a user persona that actually works, you’ll need more than just a name and a few personality traits. And since user persona creation is an iterative process, you’ll probably change it throughout the design process.

To develop a persona that guides your design process, follow these steps:

1. Decide on your approach.

Not so fast — before you start creating your primary persona, you need to decide which approach you’re going to take!

Most designers should develop qualitative personas, which are based on user interviews, open-ended surveys, and observations. These will give you a more realistic idea of who your users are, what they want, and how they behave.

If you have the time and resources, you can use statistical personas based on large data sets. These can be helpful if you’re working on a redesign of an existing product with a large user base. They are also useful for informing your marketing strategy and creating social media campaigns.

If you don’t have access to user data, you can create a proto persona. This isn’t ideal, but it’s better than nothing.

2. Conduct user research.

If you decide on the qualitative or statistical method, your next step is conducting in-depth research. This process involves:

• Recruiting survey, focus group, or interview participants
• Preparing interview questions and materials
• Conducting interviews or focus groups

If you decide to create a proto persona, you’ll need to hold a workshop (2-4 hours) with your team and key stakeholders. In the workshop, you will need to gather insights and assemble a UX persona template based on your target customer.

3. Analyze your research.

After conducting user research, your main goal is to find commonalities among your participants. These similarities will help you segment your users into different psychographic categories, which will eventually become personas.

Some of the commonalities you might find include:

• Motivations (what drives them to use your product)
• Needs (what they expect to accomplish with your product)
• Challenges (the obstacles they face while using your product)
• Behavioral patterns (how they interact with your product)
• Attitudes (how they feel about your product vs. competitors)

You can use a spreadsheet to keep track of all this information.

4. Bring your user persona to life.

Once you’ve gathered your data and have well-defined segments, you can create a user persona template based on your deeper understanding of the customer journey. Below, this template from Universe User Personas is a great example of what your persona might look like.

Source:  Universe User Personas

Remember to include a human picture and a name for your UX persona—this makes them relatable and easier to remember.

5. Share your user personas with the rest of your team.

Throughout the product development and design processes, other team members will need to refer back to your user persona. Make sure everyone on the team has access to the latest version, and keep it up-to-date as you learn more about your users.

If you’re a freelancer, you could add your user persona to your  UX design portfolio and use it as a case study for future clients.

Learn to Create Effective UX Personas With Skillcrush

Creating a user persona doesn’t have to be complicated! By following the steps above, you can create a persona that’s realistic, human-centered, and easy to remember.

If you want to supercharge your persona-creating skills, check out our  Break Into Tech + Get Hired program . This program will teach you the appropriate tech skills — including UX and UI design — so you feel confident entering the tech industry. Oh, and did we mention our money back guarantee ? Yes, you heard that right! If you don’t Get Hired after six months, we’ll give you the full cost of the program ($2499) back. Cool, right? We thought so.

And best of all, you’ll join a community of like-minded Skillcrushin’ designers who are ready to support you along your UX journey.

Desiree Cunningham

Category: Blog , Entry Level Tech Jobs , UI/UX Designer

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23 User Persona Examples, Templates & Tips (2024)

By Ryan McCready , Jan 11, 2024

Promoting a product without knowing who your target audience, or what your target audience wants, is an impossible task.

You’ll just be making decisions based on what you think they want. That’s not sustainable over the life of any brand.

That’s why creating user personas is important for any company that wants to grow.

Don’t know how to start creating one? Use Venngage’s user persona diagram templates as a starting point.

What is a user persona?

User personas are representations of your target customers. Creating user personas involves researching and outlining your ideal customer’s goals, pain points, behavior, and demographic information.

The research involved in putting together a user persona report will not only help you understand your target audience but will also help you create a better product for them.

Things like life goals, education level, age, and common problems will determine how you serve these customers in the future, especially when it comes to making marketing decisions .

Even small factors like location or salary can influence how those people make decisions, and in turn, use your product.

User personas are important for creating a targeted marketing plan , and for influencing your growth strategy . 

22 tips on how to create a user persona guide + typical user persona examples

Not sure where to start? I have compiled 20+ user persona examples, tips and templates to help you create some amazing user persona examples from scratch.

1. Create 3-5 unique and detailed personas to start

If you’re creating your first customer or user persona guides, I would design one for each of your main customer groups. Most resources recommend between three and five distinct personas, and I’m inclined to agree.

Start with one ideal user persona and slowly expand to other types of customers. Here’s an idea user persona example for a cafe:

Persona example 1: Jannelle Robinson, PhD student

Description: A busy PhD Student who needs a quiet place to study and read without distractions. She spends a lot of time on campus, refuels often and is a major coffee lover. She is the ideal customer for Julia’s Cafe. She wants to receive quick and professional service; order online from her smartphone to avoid lineups, and not deal with over-conversational staff members.

Demographics

• Gender: Female
• Location: Los Angeles, CA
• Education: Bachelor’s Degree (Undergraduate)

Motivations :

• High quality, strong coffee
• Quiet atmosphere for studying
• On or close to the college campus

Frustrations:

• Hates waiting too long for her coffee
• Doesn’t want to be bothered by the staff while studying
• Actually relies on strong coffee to help her concentrate later in the day
• She needs information on the type of coffee a cafe serves, in order to determine the quality.
• She wants to find the menu and the daily specials as quickly and easily as possible.
• She wants to order with her smartphone, avoid the usual line-up, and experience minimal distractions.

Remember to maintain a minimum of 3-5 personas. More than that number will be hard to reach. Fewer personas will narrow down your audience too much.

2. Highlight products your audience already uses in your industry

Including well-known products in a user persona guide is a simple way to add a wealth of secondary information. For example, if this user only buys Apple products and only shops at Whole Foods, you can make a lot of assumptions rather quickly.

Or like in this persona guide example, the brands that they trust can help shape that persona. I mean, a user that watches Netflix, games and uses Moz is going to have different needs than one that only reads the Economist.

Buyer persona example 2: Lisa Montoya, software architect

Description: Lisa is the software architect at Blue Cable. She sees that larger companies have a difficult time implementing improvements. She wants to streamline communications and automate as many things as possible, to maintain an agile team.

• Location: New York, NY
• Ease of use
• Solves problems
• Frequent updates
• Change is always met with resistance
• Learning curves slow down productivity
• Larger companies are more risk averse
• Discover new tools for communication, reporting, tracking and measuring
• Use small teams for large projects
• Update old frameworks to meet present standards

3. Use a customer journey map template to help create each persona

If you’re having some trouble putting together your user personas, a customer journey map may help. This is a great way for you to look at the customer’s journey from a different angle, and hopefully come out the other side with better insights.

Just like in this example, you can learn a lot about your personas by just studying how they use your product.

Click the template above to enter our online  customer journey map  maker. Customize the template to your liking–no design experience required.

4. Use icons to emphasize information in your persona guides  

I’m a huge fan of icons and illustrations, especially on infographics . These little visual helpers allow you to add context and information rather effectively. Plus, people are relatively familiar with icons, so there is no learning curve.

Because of that, they can also be used on a persona guide to illustrate a complex concept or idea. Just take a look at this example where the icons are used to showcase the user’s interests and hobbies.

Persona example 3: Sarah Bennett, marketing manager

Description: Sarah has been working in the marketing field for over eight years. She has a strong background in digital marketing strategies and holds a master’s degree in business administration. Sarah joined TechSolutions Inc. two years ago and has been leading a team of five marketers.

• Location: London, UK
• Education: Bachelor’s Degree

Sarah is motivated by achieving tangible results and driving business growth through effective marketing strategies. She values creativity, collaboration, and continuous learning. She believes in building long-term relationships with customers based on trust and delivering value.

Sarah faces challenges in effectively utilizing data analytics to optimize marketing campaigns. She finds it difficult to keep pace with the rapidly evolving digital marketing landscape and struggles to balance the demands of her role with her personal life.

The primary goal is to increase brand awareness and market share for her company’s products. She aspires to lead a team of marketers and eventually become a marketing director. She also seeks opportunities to enhance her knowledge of emerging marketing trends.

5. Find a common metric to track across your different personas

When it comes to analyzing your different user personas, you should try to have at least one similar metric between them. Otherwise, you’re going to compare really abstract things like their bio, keywords or some other written metric.

Something like a score or point can generally be compared across the board.

6. Keep layouts consistent between persona guides

Other than creating one of the most unique persona examples in this collection, this example from Shopify does something exceptionally well. Almost as well as they know e-commerce, entrepreneurship and inventory management . 

The designers kept the layout consistent throughout each card.

Consistency is key when creating an effective user persona because it allows for quick comparisons. It’s not efficient to have people aimlessly searching for info because the designer wanted to switch things up.

Image Source

7. Visualize persona data in a memorable way

Providing real stats and metrics are a fantastic way to take your persona guide to the next level. But make sure that the data you’re presenting is actually useful and memorable.

You can achieve this by creating data visualizations, like we see in the example below . By combining icons with important data the designers were able to create a visual that can be easily recalled.

If you don’t have much (or any) experience creating data visualizations, starting with a user persona guide template like this one below, can help.

Customer persona example 4: Maria Isabella, UX designer

Description:

Maria has been working as a graphic designer for the past 8 years and has built up a solid portfolio of work. She has a Bachelor’s degree in Graphic Design and is always looking for ways to improve her skills. Maria is married with two children and enjoys spending time with his family.

• Location: Las Vegas
• Explore new interests, spend quality time, and give back to the community. Add new experiences and professional friends.
• Balancing client expectations and creative freedom, often leading to compromises in her design vision and style, which may affect her overall job satisfaction.
• Juggling multiple projects simultaneously, leading to potential time management issues and an increased workload, which may impact the quality of her work or cause burnout.
• To create visually compelling designs that communicate effectively with clients and their target audience.
• To constantly improve her design skills and stay up-to-date with the latest design trends and technologies.
• To develop a strong portfolio of work that showcases her abilities and attracts new clients.

8. Highlight the differences between your personas

Different people have different goals, problems, and preferences. To help keep your marketing campaigns segmented and your product features focused, it can be helpful to highlight the differences between your personas.

Take a look at how this user persona example uses pie charts and custom illustrations to show the differences between each type of person:

9. Turn your user persona guide into an infographic

Infographics are an outstanding way to communicate visually. So why not turn your persona guide into an infographic?

The below user report includes  visuals like icons, fonts and conceptual images to be more engaging. Venngage has a ton of free infographic templates that you can use as a starting point.

10. Make sure the designs reflect the personas

To make your user persona guides more memorable, use design elements that reflect each individual persona. Think about how you can use design to reflect their age, their jobs, and their interests.

For example, if one of your personas is a 20-something-year-old student, use modern fonts and a light color palette to reflect that. 

Just take a look at this simple example and you can see how design choices influence the perception of the ideal user, as well as the written content.

Marketing persona example 5: John Edwards, marketing and sales manager

John Edwards is a seasoned Marketing and Sales Manager with a comprehensive understanding of financial reporting, sales strategies, and marketing operations. He is adept at providing strategic direction to his team, ensuring the effective engagement of beneficiaries, and presenting crucial data to stakeholders.

With a strong focus on both internal employee training and external public communication, he effectively harnesses a diverse range of visuals to convey his brand’s essence to the sales team and the wider audience. John’s dedication to storytelling serves as the cornerstone of his approach to marketing, enabling him to connect with audiences on a deeper and more meaningful level.

• Gender: Male
• Location: Seattle, Washington

John is driven by the opportunity to create impactful marketing and sales strategies that resonate with both his team and the wider audience. He finds fulfillment in effectively engaging beneficiaries and stakeholders, thereby contributing to the overall success and growth of his organization. John’s passion for storytelling serves as a catalyst for building strong brand narratives and fostering meaningful connections with clients and customers, ultimately driving business growth and success.

• Balancing the diverse responsibilities of overseeing both marketing and sales operations, potentially leading to time management challenges and a high-pressure work environment.
• Finding ways to effectively convey the brand’s story and value proposition to the sales team and wider audience, particularly when facing communication barriers or limited access to creative resources and tools.
• Create a series of visually compelling assets and materials to convey the brand’s essence and value proposition.
• Implement comprehensive financial reporting systems that provide accurate and detailed insights into the organization’s sales and marketing performance, enabling data-driven decision-making and strategic planning.

11. Thoroughly research your users’ motivations and pain points, then highlight them

When you start the actual research into specific personas it’s important to look at both the motivations and pain points of each. A few guides that I saw while collecting user persona examples focused on only one or the other.

To truly create an accurate user persona, you need to thoroughly research both your users’ motivations and pain points. You can speed this up using user research tools , which will allow you to explore your users and help you recruit them for your research. 

For example, this highly qualified influencer may find it difficult to attend events. You can position your product as a solution for them.

Persona example 6: Tracy Chadwick, director of sales

Tracy is a Director of Sales for an ad agency. Her problem is that traditional ads look boring. She is specifically looking for highly customizable designs that can be used to create slides for a presentation. She is motivated to be more creative and have her work stand out.

• Location: Portsmouth, NH
• Affordable pricing
• Boosts creativity
• Difficulty in finding presentation tools that align with her specific needs for creating visually appealing and engaging sales pitches.
• Time-consuming processes involved in manually designing and customizing slides, leading to inefficiencies in her workflow.
• Incorporate innovative visual elements into her presentations to make them more engaging and memorable.
• Discover new design tools or platforms that offer unique templates and themes for sales presentations.
• Implement interactive features in her presentations to make them more engaging and encourage audience participation.

12. Include goals that your product or service may not directly impact

Obviously, the goals that your product or service directly impacts should be featured in each user persona example. But you should also take it a step further and highlight the other goals this persona may have.

Maybe your product is a content marketing agency. You can provide solutions for users to achieve their indirect goals, like in the example below. It may not be something your product will influence or impact, but they are still important in understanding the persona.

Persona example 7: Hector Cortez, real estate agent

Hector Cortez is a family-oriented real estate agent who values spending time with loved ones and hosting social events. Committed to continuous learning and professional development, he actively pursues networking opportunities and educational resources to stay updated on market trends and cutting-edge technologies. His dedication to providing exceptional service to his clients drives him to prioritize building strong relationships and delivering tailored solutions that meet their specific needs.

• Location: Brooklyn, NY
• Education: High School
• Establishing a strong reputation in the real estate industry, thereby securing a stable and successful career for himself.
• Building a strong network of satisfied clients and fostering long-term relationships with them, leading to a thriving referral-based business.
• Inability to collaborate with professionals
• Accessing new markets
• Content creation
• Connect with professionals; access new real estate markets; increase proficiency by accessing low-hanging fruit.
• Build and maintain brand image, faster content-creation turnaround.

13. Begin your user persona guide with a helpful introduction paragraph

Part of creating a well-rounded user persona is giving them a backstory. It really doesn’t have to be much, but enough to help highlight key traits or aspects.

You can use this intro to talk about what makes your personas tick. Outline why your company should care about this persona. Or make it purely biographical, like in the user persona example above.

I like this approach because you can use it to tell a real story instead of just listing facts and figures.

Persona example 8: John Edwards, program coordinator

John is a Program Coordinator for a children’s early education program. He is responsible for keeping stakeholders informed about program enhancements and its impact. Since his reports have an impact on future decision making and program funding, he is looking for a new and engaging way to make his data “pop”. Mark thinks of himself as more of a data guy.

• Location: Seattle, WA
• Education: Bachelor’s Degree
• Ensuring that program enhancements and achievements are accurately represented through engaging data presentations, leading to increased support and funding for the program.
• Using data analysis and visualization to showcase the program’s success, thus reinforcing his role as an effective and valuable Program Coordinator.
• Difficulty in presenting complex data in an engaging and understandable format, leading to potential misunderstandings or underappreciation of the program’s achievements.
• Limited access to user-friendly and effective data visualization tools, making it challenging to create impactful and visually appealing reports that capture stakeholders’ attention.
• Develop interactive reports that facilitate better understanding and interpretation of the program’s performance, leading to informed decision-making for future improvements.
• Utilize data-driven insights to identify areas for program development and enhancement, thereby improving the overall quality of early childhood education.

14. Design a fully visual persona

There are no rules that say your user persona has to be a document or a poster .  Honestly, it can be whatever helps your brand build better experiences for your users.

If you can create one that doesn’t fit into any of the traditional conventions.  I mean, with just a handful of items, Jason Travis was able to paint a rich tapestry for each user.

Alternatively, you can craft a user persona presentation to show your team exactly who your customers are – their preferences, quirks and what they’re into. It’s like sharing a sneak peek to help everyone get the hang of your audience.

15. Include details like geographic location and salary range

Factors like location and salary are extremely useful, especially if your customer base is mostly in one geographic region. This user persona example from GB Lee made sure to feature both, but some guides omitted it completely.

Think about how different customers living in LA and NYC are, or how different the rent is when living in San Francisco and Kansas City.

Those are massive things that you can’t afford to ignore, or your persona guide will be a wasted effort.

Persona example 9: John Doe, PhD student

John is a graduate student at UCLA who cares deeply about animal rights. He spares his own time to volunteer at the local animal shelter and to promote pet adoption. He wishes to order some design artifacts to raise awareness at his school.

• Education: PhD
• Easy-to-use design tools
• Some vendors charge way too much for the designs
• Connecting with the local vendors require extra time on his end
• If he ends up not getting the funds, he has to put his own money
• Create designs that promote animal adoption
• Order design artifacts such as posters, badges and buttons to distribute them to students
• Help with crowdfunding

16. Use sliding scales or progress bar to accurately define a user

Generally speaking, the more specific your user persona guide is, the better. Take a look at the previous tip to see a few of those concrete factors.

However, other sections or factors are better defined if there is a little more gray area.

Like in this example, where personality traits are more accurate if they are graded on a scale. It’s better to say that Jerome i s a bit more extroverted than introverted. Labeling him at either extreme would paint an inaccurate picture.

Persona example 10: Jerome Carter, senior communications executive

Jerome has been in communications for ten years, and he works for a medium-sized enterprise in a senior position. He loves to problem solve, create innovative solutions, improve efficiency and productivity. He manages important clients for the company and oversees major projects by working with small teams of 7 people.

• Location: New York City, NY
• Eco-friendly
• Personalization options
• Ease-of-communication
• Confusing UX leads to more inquiries
• Lack of standardization leads to more follow ups
• To reduce emails sent
• To reduce inbound calls
• To automate more process
• To keep track of everything

17. Assign each user persona example a real name

Thinking about these personas as actual customers or people can make the whole process of developing personas more effective. That’s why I believe that assigning them a real name is so essential.

Take a look at this persona example,  if they would have used a single keyword or something like “ Runner McGee” the facade is broken immediately.

Then you run the risk of your persona guide being just another document that your team ignores. Your personas should guide your marketing plan .

Persona example 11: Daniel Strope, illustrator

Daniel Stroupe is a skilled and imaginative illustrator with a passion for creating captivating visual narratives through his artwork. With a background in fine arts and a focus on digital illustration, he combines traditional techniques with modern technology to produce intricate and compelling illustrations. He is known for his attention to detail and his ability to convey complex emotions and stories through his artwork.

• Daniel is driven by the desire to evoke emotions and inspire imagination through his illustrations. He finds fulfillment in using his artistic abilities to tell stories and communicate ideas in a visually engaging and thought-provoking manner. His passion for creating meaningful and impactful art fuels his dedication to continuously refining his craft and exploring new techniques and styles to enhance his creative expression.
• Facing challenges in effectively communicating his artistic vision and style to clients, potentially resulting in misunderstandings and revisions that could affect project timelines and overall client satisfaction.
• Balancing the demands of managing his freelance business, including client communications, project deadlines, and administrative tasks, which may encroach upon his creative time and energy.
• Develop a strong online presence and a reputable brand as an illustrator by actively sharing his work on social media platforms and building a dedicated following of art enthusiasts and potential clients.
• Enhance his technical skills and proficiency with digital illustration tools and software to streamline his creative process and produce high-quality illustrations efficiently.

18. Break down a day in the life of your user persona

To help think like your persona, it can be helpful to imagine what a day in their life is like.

An easy way to illustrate a daily or weekly routine is by using a timeline infographic . You can use icons to illustrate the different activities they do or obstacles they face, and

Plus like Monica Miller did in the user persona example, you can impart a lot of information in a rather small package.

Persona example 12: Olivia Jones, IT specialist

Description: Olivia has been living with her roommate, Julie Plasseti for 2 years. Olivia is a very devoted gamer, has a number of new electronics including a PS5 , Xbox 1080 and a powerful desktop computer. They split the utility bill even though Mara’s product likely consume considerably more energy.

• Olivia does not want her roommate paying more than her fair share. Leaving her electronics on too long affects their longevity
• Olivia is a very forgetful person and leaves many of her electronics on and running
• Olivia keeps the A/C running constantly during the summer season, due to the heat her products generate in her room
• Lower monthly bills
• Reduce energy consumption/increase efficiency

19. Present all personas guides on one page for easy comparison

Comparing the similarities and differences between your personas can be helpful when creating your marketing plan. You can make comparison easy by showing your personas on one comparison sheet (or even a comparison infographic ).

In this user persona example , they presented all three personas on one graphic. You can compare each aspect in a matter of milliseconds, instead of swapping screens or shuffling papers.

20. Summarize each user persona with a few keywords

What drive each of your user personas? Try and summarize them in a few powerful keywords.

These persona examples come from our friends at Mailchimp . I can confidently say they are my favorite in this roundup.

Not only are they visually unique and can be used as posters around the office. These guides also tell you all you need to know about each persona with only a few keywords.

21. Highlight social media or tech use

The social media platform or tech a persona uses on a daily basis should definitely be included on each guide. This tip, and user persona example , is especially useful for any brand or company that’s internet-based.  

Not knowing both of those factors could spell trouble from the beginning, Because if we were to target one of these personas on the wrong device or platform, all our efforts would be a waste.

So take the time to really find out where your personas are hanging out, and what device they use to do that.

Persona example 13: Juan Vindas, dispatcher

Description: Juan Vindas is a dedicated and efficient dispatcher with a strong background in logistics and transportation management. With a keen attention to detail and a solution-oriented mindset, he effectively oversees the scheduling and routing of resources to ensure timely and efficient delivery of goods and services.

• Location: Desamparados, Costa Rica
• Education: High school
• Cultivating strong relationships with vendors and suppliers to negotiate favorable terms and agreements for cost-effective procurement.
• Solving complex logistical challenges and ensuring the smooth execution of logistics operations.
• Balancing the demands of coordinating multiple dispatch operations simultaneously, potentially leading to increased stress and pressure to meet strict deadlines and service level agreements.
• Handling communication breakdowns and misunderstandings among team members or external stakeholders, leading to potential disruptions in the logistics process and customer dissatisfaction.
• Enhance operational efficiency by implementing advanced logistics management systems and optimizing resource allocation to minimize delivery times and maximize cost-effectiveness.
• Foster strong communication and collaboration among drivers, suppliers, and customers to ensure a streamlined and well-coordinated delivery process that meets and exceeds customer expectations.

22. Never use recognizable faces or celebrity photos

I mentioned already that you should give each persona a real name, and the same can be said when it comes to using images or headshots.

Creating the impression that this is a real person is key, so don’t use any celebrities, people from your office or recognizable faces. This could lead to people subconsciously adding traits from these people to the personas.

In this persona example, they did the right thing and used a random person. It’s almost like you’re looking at a blank slate, which really is ideal.

Persona example 14: Andrea Martius, graphic designer

Description: Andrea has been working as a graphic designer for the past 8 years and has built up a solid portfolio of work. He has a Bachelor’s degree in Graphic Design and is always looking for ways to improve his skills. Andrea is married with two children and enjoys spending time with his family.

• Struggling to find creative inspiration and maintain a consistently high level of creativity, potentially affecting her ability to produce innovative and unique design solutions for her clients.
• Difficulty in effectively communicating design concepts and ideas to clients or team members, leading to misunderstandings and revisions that may prolong project timelines and increase stress levels.
• Limited access to professional development resources or training opportunities, hindering her ability to expand her skill set and explore new areas of graphic design that could further enhance her career.

6 Types of personas for effective audience engagement

When it comes to understanding target audiences and designing effective marketing strategies or user experiences, personas play a crucial role in providing valuable insights into the diverse needs and behaviors of specific user groups.

Here are some of the common types of personas that businesses often utilize to tailor their approaches to different segments of their audience:

• Buyer personas: These are the fictional characters that represent the customers who might buy your stuff. They’re all about understanding why people make the choices they do, so you can cater to their wants and needs.
• User personas: Focus on the characteristics, behaviors and needs of individuals who interact with a product, service, or system. User personas help designers and developers create user-friendly experiences and products tailored to the target users’ requirements.
• Marketing personas: These personas are usually based on demographics, behavior patterns and preferences of the target market. They help marketers understand their target audience and create effective marketing strategies to reach and engage potential customers.
• Customer personas: These are the characters that show you what your current customers are all about. They help businesses tailor their products and services to meet the evolving needs of their customer base and improve customer satisfaction and loyalty.
• Service personas: Service personas help service providers understand the specific needs and expectations of each user group to deliver a seamless and satisfactory service experience.
• Brand personas: These personas are all about nailing down your brand’s vibe and personality. Brand personas help businesses establish a consistent brand identity and effectively communicate their values and messaging to their target audience.

Now that you know how to create an ideal user persona, it’s time to actually go do it!

These are going to take a while, and involve a lot of research but don’t get discouraged.

In the end, they will be worth it because you will be able to help your customers better.

When in doubt, start with a persona guide template.

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User & Design Research

Personas are character profiles, which are created based on user research for products and services. The user research helps in classifying different user types who have similar behavior. These user types are then described in detail with their attributes. These representative descriptions are personas. Creating personas helps understand ones users with their needs, behavior, and expectations. Personas enable researchers to create a picture of whom they are designing for. This makes the design process much easier.

Quick details: Persona

Structure: Semi-structured, Structured

Preparation: Questionnaire, Respondent recruitment, Logistics

Deliverables: Character Profiles, Persona artifacts

More about Personas

Essentially, a persona is a model, a summary profile of user types. It is outlined as a detailed description of a specific person; however, this person is fictional. Personas help researchers focus on specific characters rather than diffuse efforts to design for a large number of users.

Personas have become increasingly popular in designing solutions that are user centered than designer. Even though personas do not describe real people, they are based on real data from real people, collected and then collated into a summarized character that has generic attributes of the user type or group, one is trying to describe.

Personas: How to create them?

In the design process, designers will often start creating personas during an early phase so that they know whom they are designing for. When creating personas, the final description was such that it can give an empathic understanding of the user types. Again, the description should include and not be limited to the user’s educational background, lifestyle, interests, values, goals, needs, behavior, attitudes and other recurring patterns. The persona must have a name and the description should be at least a couple of pages to ensure that enough thought was put into creating the persona.

Finally, the participants or users that are being studied in order to derive personas, should be asked at different points of persona development whether the personas getting created are accurate as per their understanding. If the users or the teams involved in creating the personas, see any discrepancy in the descriptions, then changes must be suggested and incorporated until a general consensus is achieved.

Advantages of Personas

1. human centered.

The process of creating and the final personas that guide the design process take into account the needs and goals of the users.

2. Simpler design process

After the Personas are created, they act as the guiding principles for the rest of the design process, making the job of the designer easier as the designer becomes aware of whom they are designing for.

3. Higher acceptance by users

As the design is in accordance with who the users are and their complete descriptions taking into account their needs and goals, the final solution is as close to what the user needs and desires which gets a higher acceptance as a result.

Disadvantages of Personas

1. generic description & missed details.

Personas are after all, a general description of a cluster of users who are grouped together based on their similar behavior, needs or goals. Therefore, not all attributes of each individual user that is part of this cluster get covered. This may lead to an important aspect of individual users getting missed, which may be important to them.

2. Time consuming

Creating personas is a time consuming and elaborate process. Time is require to first recruit users, research users, cluster them and then create personas based on that research.

3. Complex findings

Every user may have different needs, behavior, goals and prioritizing which needs, behavior patterns and goals should be part of the personas and which shouldn’t is a huge task in itself. Also, personas should incorporate exceptions or extreme user descriptions to cover all aspects of users one is designing for.

Think Design's recommendation

Since the advent of User Experience Design and its popularity became mainstream, Personas has become an indispensable activity in a designers’ to-do list. There are plenty of online resources that can guide you in creating Personas and how abstract or detailed they should be. Here, we will focus more on when to employ this method and what it brings to the table.

Persona as a hypothesis

When UXers draw a Persona without enough research before that, it is more or less a hypothesis of what that Persona represent. In this case, a Persona is not a representative of a sample size of users; in fact s/he is a character profile of a hypothesized set of users. This is certainly a great way to start off with something when you have a task at hand and do not have enough time to conduct deep research. Think Design would recommend that when you are creating a Persona as a hypothesis, do involve domain or front-end experts who may have interfaced with people to rule out designers’ assumptions of actual situation.

Persona as synthesis

In this case, your Persona would be a representative user, not exactly hypothesized. This is when you have done your primary research, have understood your users and you are in a position to look at the categories of users based on their behaviour profiles. You may have employed qualitative and experiential research techniques and the Persona you are creating here is a fair representation of your synthesis.

Persona as a Customer segment

You would arrive at this when your findings are precise enough to define Customer segments. You have more or less employed quantitative research methods such as Surveys or you may have done extensive secondary research to arrive at this. When your Persona represents a customer segment, it more or less means that you can put a value next to it; and you are also clear about certain demographic details in addition to behaviour profiles. When you create Persona this way, you are serving the needs of several departments in your organization and this could become basis for product planning, opportunity identification and investment decisions.

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Related methods.

• A Day In The Life
• Be your Customer
• Bodystorming
• Customer Segmentation
• Heuristic Analysis
• Predict next year’s Headline
• Prototyping
• Role Reversal
• Simulation/ Modeling
• Try it Yourself

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User Research

What is user research.

User research is the methodic study of target users—including their needs and pain points—so designers have the sharpest possible insights to make the best designs. User researchers use various methods to expose problems and design opportunities and find crucial information to use in their design process.

Discover why user research is a crucial part of the design process.

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User Research – Get to know your Users, and What They want

To call user research a crucial part of an interaction design process might seem overly obvious. Indeed, it’s the only way to discover exactly what these users need, having first found out precisely who they are. To set out to generate these facts, you must gather data from your users through a structured approach . First, you must choose methods that 1) suit your research’s purpose and 2) will yield the clearest information. Afterwards—to get the insights you want—you’ll need to interpret your findings from all that data, which can be tricky . You can apply user research anytime during the design process. Typically, researchers begin with qualitative measures, to discover users’ needs and motivations . They might later test their results by using quantitative measures .

“Research is creating new knowledge.” – Neil Armstrong, the First person to walk on the Moon

User research essentially splits into two subsets:

Qualitative research – Ethnographic field studies and interviews are examples of methods that can help you build a deep understanding of why users behave the way they do (e.g., why they leave a website so quickly). For instance, you can interview a small number of users and get sharp insights into their shopping habits by asking them open-ended questions. Usability testing is another dimension of this type of research (e.g., examining users’ stress levels when they use a certain design). Qualitative research requires great care. As it involves collecting non-numerical data (e.g., opinions), your own opinions might influence findings.

Quantitative research – With more-structured methods such as surveys, you gather measurable data about what users do and test assumptions you developed from qualitative research. An example is to use an online survey to ask users questions about their shopping habits (e.g., “Approximately how many items of clothing do you buy online per year?”). You can use this data to find patterns within a large user group. In fact, the larger the sample of representative test users is, the more likely you’ll have a statistically reliable way of assessing the target user population. Regardless of the method, with careful research you can gather objective and unbiased data. Nevertheless, quantitative data alone cannot expose deeper human insights.

We can also split user research into two approaches:

Attitudinal – you listen to users’ words (e.g., in interviews).

Behavioral – you watch their actions through observational studies.

Usually, you can get the sharpest view of a design problem when you apply a mixture of both quantitative and qualitative research as well as a mixture of attitudinal and behavioral approaches.

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Leverage User Research Methods throughout Development

Industry-leading user experience consulting organization the Nielsen Norman Group names appropriate user research methods for you to use during your project’s four stages . Here are key methods:

Discover – Determine what’s relevant for users.

Diary studies – Have users log their performance of activities or record their daily interactions with a design.

Contextual inquiries – Interview suitable users in their own environment to find out how they perform the task/s in question.

Explore – See how to address all users’ needs.

Card sorting – On cards, write words and phrases and then let participants organize these in the most meaningful way and label categories to ensure your design is logically structured.

Customer journey maps – Create user journeys to reveal potential pitfalls and crucial moments.

Test – Evaluate your designs.

Usability testing – Make sure your design is easy to use.

Accessibility evaluations – Test your design to ensure everyone can use it.

Listen – Put issues in perspective, uncover any new problems and spot trends.

Analytics – Gather analytics/metrics to chart (e.g.) website traffic and generate reports.

Surveys/Questionnaires – Track how users’ feel about your product/design via these.

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However you approach user research, always consider the pros and cons of each technique . Card sorting is cheap and easy, for example, but may prove time-consuming when you proceed to analysis. Moreover, it might not provide in-depth contextual meaning. The resources available to you are another constraint. These will decide when, how much and which type of user research you can actually do. Therefore, carefully choose only the most relevant method/s for your research . Also, get stakeholders from your organization involved early on . They can reveal precious insights and help keep your research on track regarding business goals. Overall, user research is a valuable way to validate the assumptions the design team makes concerning users in the field , cut the expense of the best deliverables and keep your product’s demand high and ahead of competitors’ in the marketplace.

User research methods have various pros and cons and involve activities ranging from observations of users in context to controlled experiments in lab settings.

Learn More about User Research

For a fuller grasp of user research, take our course here .

See the Nielsen Norman Group’s list of user research tips .

Find an extensive range of user research considerations , discussed in Smashing Magazine.

Here’s a convenient and example-rich catalogue of user research tools.

Questions related to User Research

User Research is a fulfilling career for individuals driven to comprehend user behaviors and work collaboratively with teams. As a User Researcher, you're instrumental in steering teams towards crafting user-centric solutions. If you're intrigued by a career that combines both analytical and creative insights, consider delving into this field. For a comprehensive understanding, explore the User Researcher Learning Path on our platform.

User Researchers are seeing competitive pay in the industry. On average, they can earn from $92,000 to $146,000 annually. In some smaller firms, user research duties might be combined with a broader UX role. To understand how salaries can differ by region or delve into a broader perspective on UX-related pay, check out this detailed guide on UI UX Designer Salaries for 2023 or Glassdoor's breakdown of User Experience Researcher salaries .

While both are integral to the user experience, User Research and UX Design serve different purposes. User Research delves deep into understanding user preferences and needs, paving the way for informed design strategies. In contrast, UX Design is about sculpting a product based on that insight, ensuring it's both user-centric and aesthetically pleasing. 

Sometimes, especially in compact teams, the roles might blur with a designer handling research. Want a comprehensive insight? Dive into User Experience: The Beginner's Guide to explore their interconnected dynamics.

Yes, there is! Think of UX research as a subset of user research. While both focus on understanding users, user research casts a broader net, examining topics like pricing or delivery preferences. UX research, meanwhile, zeroes in on how users interact with a product and their experience doing so. In short, user research looks at broader interactions, while UX research specifically studies product use. To dive deeper, check out our course on User Research Methods and Best Practices .

User research utilizes varied techniques such as usability testing, A/B tests, surveys, card sorting, interviews, analytics analysis, and ethnographic studies. Every approach brings unique insights and is ideal for specific situations. It's essential to choose the proper technique based on your research goals and your audience. Discover these techniques further in 7 Great, Tried and Tested UX Research Techniques . 

For a comprehensive understanding of usability testing, a popular user research method, check out our course on User Research Methods and Best Practices .

While a related degree can be beneficial, it's not strictly required to become a user researcher. Many successful user researchers have degrees in diverse fields like psychology, design, anthropology, statistics, or human-computer interaction. What's crucial is a mix of relevant education, hands-on experience, and continuous learning. Even if some employers might favor candidates with a bachelor's degree, it can be in something other than a UX-focused area. Only some degrees specifically target user research. To strengthen your knowledge, consider courses like Data-Driven Design: Quantitative Research for UX or User Research Methods and Best Practices .

While each user research project is unique, some standard steps guide most endeavors:

Determine the research question.

Choose the proper research technique.

Find participants.

Execute the research.

Evaluate the gathered data.

Share the results.

For a thorough understanding of these steps and more, check out User Research – Methods and Best Practices .

There's a wide array of user research tools to pick from, tailored to your research goals, organizational size, and project specifics. Some popular choices include:

For surveys: Typeform or Google Forms.

Card sorting: Tools like Optimal Workshop, Maze or Trello.

Analyzing user activity: HotJar or CrazyEgg for heatmaps.

Usability evaluations: Platforms like Userlytics or Lookback.

Analyzing qualitative data: Miro or Lucidchart for affinity diagramming.

Crunching numbers: Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel for quantitative insights.

Usability testing on prototypes: Tools like Adobe XD or Figma.

Presenting findings: Use Google Slides, PowerPoint, or Prezi.

These tools often boast extra features to amplify your research.

Dive deeper into their applications with User Research – Methods and Best Practices .

User research is paramount in creating products that align with users' genuine needs and preferences. Instead of basing designs on assumptions, it provides factual insights into how users feel and interact with products. By engaging in user research, designers can spot usability challenges, collect feedback on design ideas, and validate their design decisions. For businesses, this not only refines product offerings but also strengthens brand loyalty and reputation. A standout user experience gives a company a competitive edge and lowers the chances of product setbacks. Dive deeper into the significance of user research in design with Data-Driven Design: Quantitative Research for UX and User Experience: The Beginner’s Guide .

Literature on User Research

Here’s the entire UX literature on User Research by the Interaction Design Foundation, collated in one place:

Learn more about User Research

Take a deep dive into User Research with our course User Research – Methods and Best Practices .

How do you plan to design a product or service that your users will love , if you don't know what they want in the first place? As a user experience designer, you shouldn't leave it to chance to design something outstanding; you should make the effort to understand your users and build on that knowledge from the outset. User research is the way to do this, and it can therefore be thought of as the largest part of user experience design .

In fact, user research is often the first step of a UX design process—after all, you cannot begin to design a product or service without first understanding what your users want! As you gain the skills required, and learn about the best practices in user research, you’ll get first-hand knowledge of your users and be able to design the optimal product—one that’s truly relevant for your users and, subsequently, outperforms your competitors’ .

This course will give you insights into the most essential qualitative research methods around and will teach you how to put them into practice in your design work. You’ll also have the opportunity to embark on three practical projects where you can apply what you’ve learned to carry out user research in the real world . You’ll learn details about how to plan user research projects and fit them into your own work processes in a way that maximizes the impact your research can have on your designs. On top of that, you’ll gain practice with different methods that will help you analyze the results of your research and communicate your findings to your clients and stakeholders—workshops, user journeys and personas, just to name a few!

By the end of the course, you’ll have not only a Course Certificate but also three case studies to add to your portfolio. And remember, a portfolio with engaging case studies is invaluable if you are looking to break into a career in UX design or user research!

We believe you should learn from the best, so we’ve gathered a team of experts to help teach this course alongside our own course instructors. That means you’ll meet a new instructor in each of the lessons on research methods who is an expert in their field—we hope you enjoy what they have in store for you!

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In 9 chapters, we’ll cover: conducting user interviews, design thinking, interaction design, mobile UX design, usability, UX research, and many more!

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Learning Objectives

Introducing personas, why use personas, personas the salesforce way, different needs different personas.

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Get Started with Personas

After completing this module, you’ll be able to:

• Describe what a persona is.
• Articulate why you’d want to use personas.
• Recognize the importance of basing personas on real user data.
• Describe how Salesforce creates personas.
• Distinguish different approaches to personas and when you’d use them.

With this module, we’re going to delve deep into personas and how to use them in your business. But first an essential question: What is a persona?

Personas can be described in many ways, but for the purpose of this module, a persona represents a group of users clustered based on shared behavior, motivations, goals, pain points, or other characteristics. Personas help you keep your key user groups at the front of your mind when making decisions about your product. Effective personas are created based on research to ensure that they reflect the real people who use your product.

If you’ve completed the UX Research Basics module, then you learned how to collect and analyze data about your users. (We highly recommend this module and not just because it’s all about UX, one of our favorite topics.) One way to bring user research into the design and development process is to use personas.

You can think of the personas we’re introducing you to in this module as archetypes or character sketches. There are many different approaches to personas, but in all of them, the personas don’t represent one specific user, but rather a synthesis of many users who share attributes that are meaningful for your process. So, for example, if you were creating a new restaurant in an area with a lot of offices, it might be meaningful for you to consider creating different personas, based on factors like how often people buy their lunch, what they like to spend on their lunch, and how health-conscious they are.

Personas are like categories of people that help you keep your users at the center of the design process, without having to remember hundreds, or even thousands, of individuals’ behaviors, motivations, and goals.

In the next four units you’ll get to know the Salesforce personas for Sales, Service, Marketing, and Experience Clouds. In the last unit of this module, we’ll walk through how to apply the Salesforce personas to your users. Depending on your organization’s size and structure, you may find that all of the personas are present in your organization or that only some of them are. Or you may find that some of your users map to more than one persona. Don’t worry! This is all perfectly normal.

Now that we have an understanding of what personas are, let’s talk about how they can make your design and development process easier.

We use personas to help us build better products by understanding our users and designing for their needs.

Personas capture a large number of users and highlight information about them that’s key to making meaningful decisions about your products.

Personas help you better understand the real people who use your product. Beyond title or role, personas provide insight into users’ work behaviors, and the tools they use to get their jobs done. Pretty cool right?

At Salesforce, we treat personas as archetypes of our users, viewed through the lens of the cloud that they use. Salesforce personas are crafted through rigorous data collection (observations, interviews, surveys) and analysis. They’re more than a simple title or role—they’re based on real users’ behaviors, attitudes, desires, capabilities, tools, and perspective on the product, all within the context of their needs.

Our personas are based on the general tasks users perform in their roles, rather than focusing only on what they do in their Salesforce CRM. Why do we do this? Because the Salesforce platform is highly flexible and customizable. This means people at different organizations may carry out the same task using different Salesforce features or products, or even other systems. Good news—by asking about users’ goals, motivations, and general tasks, we are able to get a fuller picture and find similarities between users across different companies.

More good news—we’re going to share these personas with you! The next three units will cover personas for the Sales, Service, and Marketing clouds. #winning

The personas we’re going to introduce you to in the next three units are abstract—they don’t have a specific name or individual associated with them. This isn’t always the case. Sometimes personas have specific names, have a photo of a person associated with them, and include demographic information such as age, gender, and family, as well as personal details like hobbies. These personas can be useful for building empathy and making the users seem real.

That’s cool, so why don’t we do that at Salesforce?

Because we have such a diverse range of users. We focus on more abstract personas that can be adapted to many different organizations and contexts. Does that sound familiar? Just like Salesforce itself can work in different organizations, our personas can too! This means our personas can represent the diversity of our users and avoid relying on stereotypes or unconscious bias. #DownWithUnconsciousBias

In the next four units you’ll get to know the Salesforce personas for the Sales, Service, and Marketing and Experience Clouds. In the final unit you’ll learn how you can use these personas in your organization.

• The Five Ws of Personas  
• The Essential Persona Lifecycle: Your Guide to Building and Using Personas  
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