Everything you need to know about creating efficient user personas

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The following is a guest post by Cherryl Pereira, Head of Content at Chisel Labs

User personas are fictitious characters that represent your ideal customers.

They may assist you in a deeper understanding of the demands and motivations of the consumers who use your product and service, as well as design a business strategy that resonates with them.

In this blog post, we’ll go through how to make effective personas for your company.

What is a user persona?
Benefits of user personas
The step-by-step process for building compelling user personas
Conclusion

What is a user persona?

User personas are an archetype of your best customer. They are fictional characters that represent the real people you want to target with your product or service.

User personas allow companies and designers to create products for a certain group of people with similar needs, goals, attitudes, and so on.

This is done by researching users’ behavior and gaining insight into their motivation for taking specific actions on websites or in apps.

Benefits of user personas

• User personas are great for marketers, designers, and product managers. They are the answer to creating products that appeal to your target audience. A user persona provides a common understanding of who you’re building software for – so everyone on your team can speak in terms of “the customer’s priorities.”
• User personas are an effective tool in designing products that appeal to your target audience! It provides everyone on the team with speaking terms around “your customers’ priorities.”
• They provide insight into what users want from their experience with you or your product–and why they use it. It is particularly useful if this understanding is incorporated with everything from success criteria to promotion materials to selling, and all the way down to service interactions. Marketers, developers, and product owners can use user personas to explain who their target market is and how to engage them.
• Personas are also helpful for removing any unintentional bias you might have about your users or potential customers, which could lead to poor decisions in design or marketing strategies. This includes gender stereotypes (i.e., only women buying cooking utensils), age discrimination (only young people use social media), and other demographics that shouldn’t be taken into consideration when designing a product meant for anyone using it.
• The information you gather through personas can then be synthesized into different types of user stories too! User stories describe interactions between the user and the product. They detail what happens before, during, after–and provide context around why this matters from each persona’s perspective.
• A product can be developed with complete understanding of who is using it and what value they will receive. This leads to better communication within teams because everyone understands their audience more clearly.

The step-by-step process for building compelling user personas

Identify your target audience: Who are your personas? Who would be a great use of this product or service?

Clarify the objectives: What do you want to accomplish with your persona research and development process? Define some success metrics.

Decide whether to create new personas or tweak old ones: Developing specific User Personas is vital if you don’t yet have a target audience in mind for what you’re attempting to accomplish. Whenever bringing on more attributes that aren’t relevant, it’s a great way to put yourself in the users’ shoes first (you can always go back later). It’s preferable to establish your predictions on evidence from consumer research, surveys, and other sources rather than just guessing who they are based on your company’s features.

Create a detailed list of user personas: you will use this list as the foundation for your research and design process.

Define the blueprint of the user personas: This includes traits that define each persona type that should cover 100% of your target audience (e.g., age range). Thus ensuring everyone falls under one category – not multiple categories.

Include information about the typical day of a user persona: For example, what time they typically use your product or service, where they are located, and other relevant background contexts that will help you define how to design for them. Finally, include any particular challenges this type of user may have with using your product/service as well as their goals when engaging in it. This helps establish empathy within the UX process(Learn about UX design here.)which is crucial for creating products people love! personas with steps in detail. go back later).

Data collection: It’s best practice to build off of data collected from market research and interviews than just making assumptions about who they might be based upon your company’s characteristics. This step involves asking questions rather than making assumptions about what users want or need.

Empathize: Creating a persona involves putting yourself in the user’s shoes and asking, “What do they want? What will make them happy?” Creating a persona involves putting yourself in the users’ shoes and asking, what would they need or want.

You should create at least three to five personas that represent your target audience as accurately as possible. This is why it benefits you to have at least 3-5 detailed personas representing your customers as closely as possible.

That way everyone on your team is able to use these profiles effectively throughout the development stages.

In turn, this will allow each department to feel more involved. They can understand who exactly they are creating a product/service for.

To create your user personas, you need to understand the demographics of who is using your product/service now. You also want to ask yourself some questions such as age, gender, interests, and so on.

An example could be a company that was creating a new social media platform. They might consider making it more appealing for younger people between ages 12-25.

In addition, this would allow them to make their marketing campaign very clear and concise. They can try to attract certain users over others. This all depends on what demographic they are going for or which one is most profitable at the time.

By doing all of this research beforehand, you can assess whether or not a feature should be added. The data you’ve gathered can help you determine what changes need to be made.

It also helps to figure out how long it might take for certain features to be used, if they are being utilized at all. That can save a company time and money in the long run as well.

This makes user personas a critical part of any type of marketing campaign. It allows for better decision-making and planning to take place.

The most important step when creating effective user personas is figuring out exactly who will benefit from using the product or service. If this part doesn’t get completed properly then everything else down the line will suffer. Therefore, make sure not to rush through it at all costs.

Once this has been achieved, you should go through and detail the most important features of your product or service.

After this step is complete, you need to list down a series of questions that the users can answer with ease.

These types of questions should be about how they use their device(s), if there are certain things they wish were on it (e.g., security), and also what their goals would be while using such an item/service (e.g., entertainment).

With these questions now complete, you should go through and answer them yourself. This will ensure that you designed your product or service for ease of use and uniqueness. Then the user will want more.

Additionally, you must evaluate how much time they have available during the day, and also how much money they are interested in spending upon an item/service, in order to avoid pricing them out of purchasing one.

After that, you can pinpoint what type and number of devices users would be interested in buying.

Conclusion

You may now create a persona based on who your consumers are, what they want to achieve with your product or service, where they fit economically, and when they use it (day vs night).

User personas should be based on real people who respond to the questions posed above.

They must be relevant in order for developers to build something fresh for them. User personas should resemble reality, mimicking a type of consumer that already exists.

However, if you don’t present designs appropriately, they are likely to fail. This is because the design did not always meet existing use expectations/patterns you may have found in the persona-building process.

Cherryl Pereira is the Head of Content at Chisel. Chisel Labs is a premiere agile product management software company that brings together roadmapping, team alignment, and customer connection.