The basics of user personas

Let’s kick off with this four minute video: you learn what a persona is and what you’ll have to consider when illustrating it.

If you are looking for more detailed information, take a look at the rest of this article. Here we will provide you with the most important information about journey maps and how to work with them. We will cover the following questions:

• Definition of personas
• How many personas do I need?
• Why do I need personas?
• How to create a persona?
• How to research a persona?
• Ad-hoc vs. data-driven personas
• Persona cheat sheet

What is a persona?

A person is a fictional profile that represents a group of people –such as users, potential customers, or employees– as well as their mindsets, their wants and needs and behavior patterns. It is created to help design teams better understand and empathize with their target audience. Personas are typically based on research data and insights gathered from real users through interviews, observations, and other research methods. After defining the characteristics of your persona(s), you can use them in your daily work.

The goal of personas is creating empathy by walking in the shoes of someone else, such as customers, employees, or citizens.

Often personas are used to describe customer or user segments. Creating personas can lead to new insights who your customers really are and why they are using your products or services. Personas help to give a team a shared understanding of their customers and are a valuable basis for journey mapping and stakeholder mapping, as well as many other tools.

Types of personas

Personas can be classified into various types based on their characteristics and attributes. Common categorizations are based on demographic information (such as age, gender, oroccupation), psychographic information (such as emotions and values), behavioral information (such as browsing habits orpurchase history).

Customer persona

Customer personas represent the different target customer groups of your business. Different customer personas allow you to gain a better understanding for your customer segments and let you target them appropriately. A customer is not necessarily a buyer persona, just think of a customer that is using a free software without paying for it.

Buyer persona

Buyer personas represent the different types of actual buyers of your products, so the persons who make the decision about the purchase. Different buyer personas can show different motivations for their purchase, also they might differ in their purchasing power and purchase history. A buyer persona is not necessarily the user of your product, for example when a company buys software for their employees.

User persona

User personas represent the different types of actual end-users of your product. The person using your product does not necessarily have to be the same person as the one buying your product, just think of adults buying toys for their children.

Website (User) persona

Website user personas represent the different types of users visiting your website. In contrast to user and buyer personas, a website user does not necessarily interact with your product, maybe they only read your online content.

This typification depends on the scope and zoom-level you want to apply to your project, for a high-level customer journey you should be fine with using a general persona. If you want to dive deeper, however, the differentiation above might help you to better understand the different types of personas you are interacting with.

How many personas?

So how many of these “fictional profiles” should you create? The answer differs from organization to organization and from project to project, but to give a rule-of-thumb guideline: you will probably need between three to seven core customer personas. It’s unlikely that you’ll have less than three different target groups. It is however likely that you won’t really use personas in your work if you’d have more than seven of them. You simply wouldn’t really remember them and that the personas are getting too granular. Besides your core personas, you can have many more extreme case personas to test ideas from rather extreme points-of-view.

Why do I need a persona?

Creating empathy

Personas illustrate for whom a product or service is created for. They represent your target group and allow to slip into their shows. It’s easy to empathize with personas and you’ll easily understand your customer’s need and context-of-use. In contrast, it is really hard to empathize when you visualize a target group through e.g. an excel chart. The data is just too abstract. When you see the world from your customer’s perspective, determining what data is useful and what data is not becomes a lot easier.

Getting a team on the same page

Personas are simple illustrations to communicate research data within a team. Without a lot of knowledge, everybody can follow research findings and get a picture of what your target group looks like.  When everybody shares the same understanding of their customers, building consensus on important issues becomes easier as well.

Testing with personas

Use personas to test your ideas for new or improved products, services, or features. You can slip into your customers’ shoes and go through different scenarios with your persona(s) in mind. If it’s likely that your persona would have problems with a feature or gets frustrated when using your product or service, your real customers probably have difficulties as well.

How to create a persona?

A persona is generally defined like a real person. It usually has a name, description, and characteristics. Define which background (education, job position) your persona has, to make the description even more precise.
Describe both the person as a human being (background story, personality, interests, etc.) and as a stakeholder in context of a service ecosystem (needs, expectations, etc.).

The following example illustrates the key points a basic persona profile usually contains:

Profile picture: Use an authentic photo that expresses your persona’s character.

Name: Give the persona a name that matches your target group. Choose a name that reflects your persona’s heritage and social environment. Try to make it real – your team might have to live with this name for longer.

Quote: This could describe your persona’s attitude in one sentence. Ask yourself: What would help team members to empathize with this fictional person?

However make sure to not be too biased by the demographics. For example, if your persona is a prince born in 1948, British citizen, grown in London and fancies cars and good wine – it could be Prince Charles, but also Ozzy Osbourne.

Occupation: Where does your persona work? What does she do (status)? Add information about the company (e.g. size, type, etc.) and her career (goals).  

Description: There is not one recipe to describe a persona. Use this field to describe further stories and characteristics. What does a typical day look like? What are favorite places to go?
Add additional information, such as expectations, education, hobbies, interests, motivations etc. This will always depend on the focus of your project. For example, it might be interesting to add a section for favorite channels and devices if you’re looking to improve your cross-channel communication. Or it might be interesting to name past experiences if you’re trying to optimize a journey to personas who have made use of your service in the past.

Slider: On this one dimensional scale you can visualize characteristics from high to low or whatever specification you prefer to use. Here we used technological affinity in order to show that Anna is a very tech savvy person who prefers digital versions of tickets, boarding passes etc.

Mood images: Enrich your persona with contextual photos of their lives. What does their home or work place look like? What’s in their purse? What are their hobbies? Humans are brilliant at understanding and empathizing with images and will have an easy time grasping a persona’s personality.

Icon and color:. The small stripes on the icon mark that this is a persona – other than a simple stakeholder with no further characteristics.

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⇨ Tips for starters:

#1 Personas need to be updated. You should always be conducting research, talking to your users and questioning your personas. As technology and trends tend to change from time time, your personas will also do so!

#2 Spread it all. Personas should be shared with everybody in your company in order to make the best out of your data!

#3 Keep it short and simple. All information about your persona should be summarized on 1 page! Any member of your team should be able to look at this document and absorb all the main information in a few minutes.

#4 Work online. A persona software helps to collaborate with geographically dispersed teams and quickly iterate on personas.

How to research a customer persona?

If you now ask yourself where you get all the information you need to develop personas, start by preparing a list of questions you want to answer. For example if you want to research a customer persona:

Profession:

• What is the customer’s role in the company?
• What type of company does the customer work for?
• What level of education has the customer achieved?
• What are the customer’s biggest challenges at work?
• What are the customer’s career goals?

Home & Hobbies:

• What does the customer like to do for fun?
• What does the customer read for fun?
• What is the customer’s gender/age/household income?
• Who lives with the customers at home?
• Where does the customer live?
• How does the customer spend his/her free time?
• What is important to your customer?
• What are his/her needs?

Technologies:

• How tech savvy is the buyer?
• Which social networks does the customer prefer?
• How does the customer prefer to communicate?
• Who does your customer turn to for advice or information?
• How do they make decisions and how long does it take them? What influences their decisions?
• How does your customer respond to change?
• How does his/her buying behavior look like?

The next step is to choose from different types of data sources. Which data source you use depends on your personal preference and on the type of data you are looking for.

Check your website and social media analytics programs. They can’t tell you who your target customers should be, but they can provide demographic data about the users who are currently interacting with your website and social profiles. Google Analytics for example gives you insights on where your visitors live as well as age, gender, affinity, and technology.

For elements that can’t be seen through data analytics, surveys are a simple way to collect customer data fast. Many survey tools offer suggestions for how to word certain demographic questions to ensure you get the most accurate responses and avoid any confusion. You can also generate an enormous amount of information by sending surveys containing the questions listed above to your existing customer base. If possible, consider offering a small incentive (like a coupon or free sample product) to customers that complete your survey.

Traditional market research can also be an option – if you have the budget. Investing in focus groups or one-on-one interviews with your target group can provide great data for your personas. Also, such qualitative research methods will give you deep knowledge about your customers’ feelings and motivations that sometimes can not properly be tackled by quantitative research.

Ask your employees. The people that work for you generally know the most about your customers, because they made the most experiences with your target group.  Especially the sales or support departments occupy lots of customer based information.

Make guesses based on past experiences. If you’re short on money, you can always answer the questions based on your own observations. However, keep in mind that this data won’t be completely objective and not enough to inform your future marketing initiatives. Make sure to challenge your assumptions in the long run and back them up with real data.

Ad-hoc vs. data-driven personas

Personas should ideally be based on some kind of research and often represent a group of people with shared interests, common behavior patterns, or demographical and geographical similarities. However, such patterns or commonalities are sometimes rather misleading, so be careful to avoid obvious stereotypes.

That being said, personas can also be based on assumptions. We distinguish between two different types of personas: ad-hoc and data-driven Personas. Ad-hoc personas are rather simple and quick personas often created during a workshops for example with frontline staff (e.g. support). Data-driven personas are based on research data (qualitative and quantitative) from various sources, such as interviews, observations, design research, surveys, statistics, etc.

Here is a rough overview of the differences between ad-hoc and data-driven personas:

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⇨ Pro Tip: The bigger your budget, the more precise the definition of your target group should be!

Persona cheat sheet

Personas are often used to describe a group of people that represent a customer segment. Even thought it’s essential to always keep your individual case in mind, you can use diverse description types to develop them.

This cheat sheet gives you an overview on some frequently used types of information how to use them on a persona template.  

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Templates

There exist multiple templates that guide you through the creation process.

• Digital template: you can create digital personas with Smaply for free
• Pen & paper template: If you want to co-create personas in a workshop, we recommend using printable pen & paper templates. We also offer more templates for you to download here. They make it easier for you to develop personas within a group before working on them online.

And now, what's next?

It's time to practice what you've learned! For example, use Smaply's persona creation tool to digitize your personas, create professional exports, and share them with your team or client.

Sign up now, it's free.