When it comes to UX and product design, you need to know how to create a user persona for solving problems and delivering the best experience to the right target audience. However, it can take time to figure out where to start. Because knowing about user persona theory is different from applying it.
What is a User Persona?
User personas are fictional characters that represent your ideal or current users. Personas are created from deep researching a target user’s needs, what they want, or even their expectations. User personas will help you understand your users’ problems, behaviour patterns, and goals. You also need to know about persona, why and how you should use them.
With User Persona Emphasize Your Target User
User personas leverage our unique ability to empathize with other humans to create targeted solutions. Using user persona, we can learn about our users and their needs. Remember, it’s essential to understand who will be using your product.
Understanding your users better helps you design products and choose the right features or design elements you will use. So, you can put more effort into improving the experience for your users and make your product more beneficial for them.
What Should a User Persona Consist of?
According to Career Foundy, by answering the following questions, you can define who is your target audience and define your user persona:
- Who is my ideal customer?
- What are the current behavior patterns of my users?
- What are the needs and goals of my users?
- What issues and pain points do they currently face within the given context?
When you can define a persona for your product, you will efficiently identify and communicate user needs. Personas help in planning and making wise design choices. They help to focus efforts and build empathy by making real users memorable for the product team.
How to Create a User Persona
After knowing the perks of a user persona, let’s move on to some practical tips to develop your persona.
1. User research
You will understand the target audience’s motivations or behavior through user research. During this step, you need to avoid creating a fake persona. Use real data and don’t make s You can collect the information by doing interviews or observations of real users, but if it’s impossible, you can still make a persona based on what the team knows about the users. Stories about made-up characters that are entirely fictional and based on little or no research are useless for the design process and may even damage your product.
2. Analysis research findings
The next step is to analyze your findings based on your research. This step aims to find patterns in the user research data that allow for the classification of comparable individuals into user type
3. Create personas and prioritize them
At this step, the researcher’s task is to convey the classification of personas so that they can be understood and have empathy enough to understand the consumers. Avoid the desire to include too many personal details during this step. Too many details will distract the persona’s credibility as an analytical tool.
The number of user personas should be kept to a minimum at this step in order to focus on the design, which may enhance success.
4. Let’s start creating a user persona
When creating a user persona template, you should include the following details: persona name, photo, demographics (gender, age, location, marital status, family), goals and needs, frustrations/problems, behaviours, personality or something like quotes or slogans.
At this step, please avoid using a real name or someone you know. Your user personas may become less objective. You’ll concentrate on designing for one individual rather than a group with similar characteristics.
5. Utilize and share
Sharing personas with stakeholders is essential for driving the design team to action. Each team member and stakeholder should be positively linked with and value the personas. As the identities become more well-known, people begin referring to them as if they were real individuals.
Take note that user persona plays a significant role in developing your product. Once you create a good user persona, it can be your guide in the ideation process and helps designers produce a great UX for the target users.