How To Create a User Persona
When companies are faced with the challenge of launching new products and services or even just revitalizing what they’re currently offering, one of the best steps they can take is to create user personas. By doing the research and going through the effort of molding these personas, you’re able to fully know your target audience and test the waters for your product.
We have everything you’ll need to know to create your own well-defined user personas.
What is a User Persona and Why Do You Need One?
User personas are characters that a company creates to imitate its target customer. These fully developed profiles dig into who the ideal customer would be including their background, education, home life, and motivations. A company may have only one or they can choose to create several personas according to the demographics they’re targeting.
These characters are developed after extensive research such as surveys, focus groups, and interviews which allow the marketing team to really dig into the wants and needs of consumers and how the company can help provide for them. Once this information is uncovered, a company can focus all its efforts on improving their customer experience and marketing to its target audience.
At this point, they should be able to answer the following:
- What is my target audience?
- How do they make their purchasing decisions?
- What do they need from me and how can I give it to them?
- Are there any pain points that they’re experiencing?
These questions and answers give shape to the buyer persona but it’s just the beginning. Let’s keep going and see what the user persona should include.
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What a User Persona Should Include
You’ve done the research and learned the wants and needs of your target audience. What now? Now it’s time to create your unique user personas. You’ll follow four steps when creating these semi-fictional characters and we’re detailing them for you below.
1. Name and Claim Them
Your personas need their own name and image which will go in their header along with a quote that sums up what matters most to them. This gives readers an easy insight into who this user is and what motivates them.
2. Build the Demographic Profile.
You decide the user’s name and picture, but the research decides the demographic information. This portion should include three sections: background, current environment, and psychographics.
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The user’s background should detail their basic information such as age, gender, marital status, education, marital status, and occupation. Anything that explains where they came from and what made them the person they are now.
Next is the user’s current environment. This section will cover where you can find this person now and what their physical and social lives look like as well as how tech-savvy they may be.
The user environment represents the physical, social, and technological context of the user.
Finally, the psychographics section covers the more nuanced aspects of the persona such as their interests, motivations, and pain points.
By understanding all these sections, you can better understand who your target audience is, where they are, and why they make the decisions that they do (or don’t).
1. Anticipate the end goal.
When you’re creating your user personas, always keep the user’s end goal in mind. It’s why they buy what they do and what problems they’re trying to solve. Their end goals are their main driving forces, and you must fully understand them if you’re going to figure out how to get your product or service into their lives.
2. Write a Narrative
It’s time to write your user’s narrative by describing a scenario depicting how the user may interact with your product in their day-to-day life. It should be written from their perspective and be detailed while explaining the issues that led them to need your services and how using them may change their lives.
User Personas: Worth the Effort
Creating user personas can, and should, take considerable time and effort but it’s an extremely worthy cause when you consider the benefits of intimately knowing your target audience. Gather as much data as you can then mold it into personable characters that will help inform your team when developing and/or revitalizing your products and services.