7 Things You Should Have in Mind When Creating a User Persona

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A user persona is a great tool for your brand when finding solutions to solve issues and collecting important data. For any business, it is vital to understand who will be using your product or service and why it will help them. That is why having a user persona and doing UX research are so important.

🚀Read: Customer Experience Guide: How to Put your Customers First? 🚀

The user persona is the fictional representation of your ideal client or customer. Best user persona models will give you a full picture of your target market and how your product, service, or design will provide them the best option for choosing.

Why Do I Need a User Persona?

Your user persona helps you understand your customer better, and any business or brand tends to be customer-focused. Developing techniques to dive deep into your user’s complexities enables you to identify them, what they like, their hobbies and interests, and their issues, giving you a better sense of how to assist them. 

You can tailor your product or service to fit the needs of your user persona effectively. And while you could develop your product, service, or design without the help of a user persona, it is more challenging to know just how effective it will be within an already competitive market.

User personas help provide you with direction and purpose. If you can effectively review the results from an SEO campaign, you should identify and hone in on some elements that correlate to your customer base. Here are some of the essential aspects you should have in mind when developing your brand’s best user persona.

Read How to Increase User Engagement on Your Website

Picture 1. Create a user persona that fits best for your brand core values

The Basic Information

When developing your user persona model or template, you should always have the most basic information to help you, known as the Header. Some of the information that is most helpful, to begin with and include is:

• Name
• Age
• Gender
• Location
• Occupation
• Marital Status
• Personality Image
• Mini Biography

This basic demographic information, or Header, about your user, will give you an overall picture of who they are. You most likely will not be able to get all of this information about every single user, but collecting as much of this upfront information can give you an excellent idea of the typical users of your product or service.

There should be an overview of the basic information, such as how you might describe the user. Try with something simple, like “Busy College Student” or, if you are targeting moms, it could be something like “Working Moms.” This is known as the specific archetype or your target persona and the main type of person you want to help drive your brand.

The Demographic Profile

The header information that you gather can be fictional for the most part, but when it comes to the demographic details of your user persona, those need to be based on actual research. There are four parts to the demographic profile.

PERSONAL BACKGROUND – the age, gender, ethnicity and culture, education, marital status are all part of the personal background. 

PROFESSIONAL BACKGROUND  – the job or occupation and salary range and previous work experience are the primary focus.

PERSONALITY – your persona has hobbies, interests, attitudes, motivations, and pain points. Developing the personality will help you understand why your use behaves a certain way and why they use your product or service.

ENVIRONMENT – the surroundings that your user has around them includes things like devices, where they spend their time (home, the office), and how they work with others.

Picture 2. The more questions you know answer to, the better!

The Main Objective

So the main question you have to ask about your brand is this: What does your user want or need, or what will they achieve when utilizing your product or service? The end goals are your driving force. They will bring you motivation to determine what your user persona profile needs to fulfill the main objective. 

For example, if your business is built around a product intending for working moms that helps their babies sleep through the night – the working mother’s end goal will be to find peace, solace, and sleep for their babies (and possibly themselves). With your product, they can achieve this.

The Issue That Needs Solving

Your product or service is centered around addressing a specific pain point or issue. A user persona will provide you with their problems to precisely tailor and market your product or service to help them.

When creating your user persona, you need to ask questions that include:

• What challenging or complex tasks are they facing?
• Are they struggling with when it comes to ______?
• What do they complain about the most about it?
• How will my product, service, or design address this?

By discovering all of your user’s fears, frustrations and challenges, you can further design your service or product while fully answering those questions. It helps to eliminate any objectives that might cause someone to hesitate – your customer won’t hesitate to purchase, because you have addressed all of the issues.

The Narrative

Storytelling is key to developing your user persona. You need to create a narrative or customer journey that helps get you from point A to point B – in other words, how your user will interact with your product or service that will allow achievement of the end goals. Typically, you would write out the scenario from the perspective of your persona, describing things that may or could happen.

For example, going back to the “Working Moms” product, the narrative might look something like this:

“I have to work 9-5, but my baby has it’s own sleeping schedule so I am usually up a bunch of times. Every day I feel sleep-deprived and it shows in my work results. I need something that will help my baby to rest peacefully so that I can get my own rest and feel energized for whatever comes my way that day.”

Tools and Templates for Your Persona

One last thing you should keep in mind when creating your persona is what tools or software you will use to create it. There are many options out there for creating a user persona, so here are some of the top contenders and what they can offer your brand. You must choose a template that gives you the most relevant information about our service or product.

Hubspot – though this is mainly a marketing automation app, it does offer a persona template, working on a “plug-and-play” model. You don’t get the option of customizing your picture, but you can add as many elements that you want that might not have an area in their “Add New Section.”

Xtensio  – their user persona template has seven different sections to help you cover the entire user profile, and you can adjust the layout easily so that it fits what you want to see most.

Mailchimp doesn’t have sections for their user persona templates, but rather just a single name and job title, with words describing the user surrounding them, such as personality and struggles.

Shopify – Shopify uses more of a card-like user persona template with a keyword or nickname. A little bit different and less reliant on images.

User Personas Provide Opportunities

In order to effectively build and grow your brand, implementing a user persona will give your business much-needed opportunities. Departments can learn and be guided to what processes or improvements can create a better product or service customized to your customer needs and wants. 

People are constantly changing their minds, and creating user personas can also help you keep up with those ever-changing needs. Just ensure you are using details and collecting data that serve a purpose for your business. User personas help develop your service or product, and you can always revert to your persona to help you make necessary changes.