I recently completed some ‘user persona’ work as part of a website design and build project for an existing client. When the work was complete, I had some interesting feedback from the client that got me thinking; after finishing the user personas, my client said that going through the exercise of understanding and bringing to life her customers helped her with new ideas for her business.

This conversation got me thinking, and I thought it could be useful for other people to find out about user personas and how they could help businesses.

What Are User Personas?

“A persona, (also user persona, customer persona, buyer persona) in user-centred design and marketing is a fictional character created to represent a user type that might use a site, brand, or product in a similar way.”

— WIKIPEDIA

The interaction design foundation explains personas in an excellent way

“Personas are fictional characters, which you create based upon your research in order to represent the different user types that might use your service, product, site, or brand in a similar way.”

— INTERACTION DESIGN FOUNDATION

Personas are often used in a user-centred design process, they are built from customer interviews and data to create profiles of your different customer types.

Personas can take different forms but are usually 1 or 2-page documents that give an overview of a specific customer type. The information included in a persona can be:

• Factual information - the persona’s name, where they live, where they work, if they have a family

• Interest information - what they enjoy doing, hobbies, where they spend their free time, what they do on an average day

• Where they consume information and entertainment - what website they use to find information or news, which social media networks they use and how they use them

• Goals - what does this customer want to achieve in the long and short term

• Challenges - what is the main thing stopping or making it hard for the customer to achieve their goal

How Do You Create A User Persona?

One way to make sure you are creating valuable personas is to talk to your existing customers; find out who they are, what they do, what their goals are and what their pain points are.  

A great way to do this is user interviews - ask a series of questions to a range of your customers and record the answers that they give. Once you have completed a number of different interviews, you can start to break down the data you have collected. It can also help to have a blend of quantitative and qualitative data when creating your personas.

Once you have all the data, you can start making your key personas. Start by describing the person you are creating a persona for. Bringing the character to life can help you resonate with them, so try giving them a name. Naming them also helps everyone be on the same page when discussing different personas.

“Creating personas will help you identify with and understand the user you’re designing for.”

— INTERACTION DESIGN FOUNDATION

Here is a mock-up of one of the user personas I created for my client. This page shows the overview and gives a quick intro to the user, their key drivers, and their reasons for wanting to use the service.

Lene Nielsen has created a  “10 steps to personas”, which details all the steps you can take to make great user personas. 

How Can User Personas Be Useful To Your Business?

Once you have created your user personas, you can start to define business situations where the user may need or want to interact with your business.

Start to identify situations where customers may need to use your product or service. In the example I created, I talked to the client about when someone is recovering from an injury and requires regular exercise to help. The requirement for regular specific training is the trigger for that particular customer to start researching Personal Trainers. Using the personas, the client can focus on how this customer would discover and contact a potential Personal Trainer.

Using the personas you have created, you can begin to work out how each persona might look for solutions to what they require.

Each persona may approach the same scenario differently and breaking down the situation in this way allows you to consider the best way to communicate with each specific user group; it could be on a specific social media channel or by reading information on a blog. This approach will hopefully connect and resonate with your different personas.

This last section is where the client found real value - taking the personas that we had created and overlaying them to different scenarios meant we could create specific user journeys for each persona. Content for the website is designed with a particular persona in mind and marketing activity is now specific to each persona.

Creating user personas is not something my client had done or considered before, but this process moved her away from projecting her views onto business decisions and moved it more towards the perspective of her customers.

Hopefully you have found this useful, here are some links to additional resources about creating user personas and their potential uses.

How to easily create remarkable content with marketing personas (Hubspto)

Persona marketing (Sales Lead Experts)

UX persona examples (Mockplus)