User Personas

Please note: This content reflects industry best practices. We’ve provided links to third-party resources where appropriate.

What Are User Personas

Personas are fictional users whose goals and characteristics represent the needs of a larger group of a product’s users or potential users. A user persona is a simple story framed around the user’s goals, expectations, behaviors, and pain points. They establish an understanding of the user that the product is designed for to help build empathy within the organization.

How Are User Personas Used

User personas help product and UX teams align on who they are serving and the problems they face. By understanding the user’s core objectives and motivations, UX teams can prioritize solving the problems that are most important to the user. This can lead to a better user experience, higher satisfaction, and customer retention. User personas provide a foundation for mapping out the user journey (also known as user experience) which can translate into user stories and wireframes, then eventually functional requirements. User personas themselves should also be prioritized so the product teams can maintain focus on the personas that matter most to the customer.

How Often Do User Personas Need To Be Updated

Personas are only effective if they’re accurate. The most effective user personas are built on a foundation of real insight and actual patterns observed. User research, such as interviews, focus group discussions, usability tests, and field observations, can help build and validate your personas. However, as business models and goals evolve over time, the data from your user research can become outdated and your user personas could become obsolete too. You should update your personas at least once a year to reflect the latest business trends and demographic shifts. Ensure updates are based on observed patterns and insights from additional user research.

Learn more about personas at the Interaction Design Foundation.

How to Create a Valuable User Persona

Check our User Personas Template and Examples.

Collect user information through research methods* such as interviews, usability tests, surveys, field studies, and/or group discussions.
Identify behavioral patterns from the data collected. Conduct an empathy mapping exercise.
Synthesize the patterns into user personas.
Incorporate the user personas into the UX design process. Develop user journey maps and user stories, which will help inform functional requirements.

*If conducting research is not an option, a proto persona can be developed using secondary research from external sources (like job postings and articles) or stakeholder brainstorm sessions.

Questions to Guide the Context of Your User Persona

Valuable user personas are context specific, which means they should focus on the behaviors and goals of the users. If you provide context, it can help overcome any implicit prejudices. Consider a user’s activities, attitudes, aptitudes, motivations, and skills when laying down the foundation of your persona.

The following are some questions that you can ask yourself to help guide the creation of your user persona:

WHAT are the user’s roles and capabilities?
WHEN is the user in need of a solution?
WHERE is the user experiencing frustrations or pain points?
WHY should the user want to engage with the product?
HOW will users interact with the product?

Tip: Consider empathy mapping to help create your persona. An empathy map is a tool that can help you investigate beyond the surface level and help identify behavior patterns. You’ll be able to further empathize and synthesize your observations from the research phase to bring forth unexpected insights about your user’s needs.

Group by inclusive behavioral traits

When synthesizing your collected data, identify patterns that extend beyond exclusionary demographics. Instead, group data by behaviors to avoid assumptions that are not based on real data. This can help avoid implicit biases.

Group by behaviors:

Purchase groceries online
Uses dog walking services
Orders coffee ahead of time for pickup

Don’t group by limiting factors:

Gender
Martial status
Ethnicity

Be specific

Avoid generalizing pain points. Ambiguity can often lead other team members to draw their own conclusions and misunderstandings. Pinpointing your users’ frustrations and motivations will allow for a deeper understanding of their behaviors to help guide the framework of your persona.

Use specific pain points:

Lack of time management tools
Not enough time
Too distracted

Don’t use general pain points:

Time

Tell a compelling story

Effective storytelling requires concisely structuring stories that will engage the audience.
Remember that your narrative should be backed by the information gathered from your user research.

User personas can be written in either third-person (she/he/they) or first-person (I, me), but we recommend third-person to avoid personal bias. Remember you are NOT the user!

Focus on the content and story by providing in-depth descriptions of the user’s context and needs.
Don’t be tempted by visuals and aesthetic designs.
Don’t use technical jargon.

Check out storytelling tips from NN/g

Next Steps

Once you have completed your user personas, you can develop persona task lists (or jobs-to-be-done), journey maps, and user stories, which can help with the development of feature and functional requirements. Further UX should be conducted to guide product design along with the user persona.

Outline Task Lists

Task lists involve identifying tasks that a user must complete to achieve their goals. This activity focuses on outcomes, while user personas focus on key behavioral characteristics.

Create a User Journey Map

A user journey map, or user experience map, outlines the high-level process or workflow that a persona will follow to accomplish a goal. This provides context on how and when the user might interact with a product. It informs hierarchy, layout, and content within an interface.

Learn more about journey mapping.

Write User Stories

User stories are concise, outcome-oriented statements that define a persona’s goals without specifying product functionality. They follow a structure, such as: “As a [persona], I want [desired action] so that [desired outcome].” Use them to help inform functional requirements.

Learn more about writing user stories.

Resources

User Personas (Template)

View

Empathy Mapping (Template)