A User Persona is a profile of your ideal customer and is used to create a more in-depth understanding of customers and how they interact with your business or organisation’s products and services. They provide insights on aspects such as a customer’s demographics, behaviours, priorities and preferences.
Sometimes the assumption is made that creating a persona can replace talking to actual customers, but this isn’t the case. Instead, personas should be used as a helpful way of condensing and presenting the findings of real user research. When based on real insights and data, they become a highly valuable reference, when based on untested assumptions they can be misleading and distracting.
You can have more than one user persona to represent ideal customer groups with different needs but it’s important not to have too many, otherwise, the personas can become counterintuitive and complicate matters, leading to less effective solutions.
Ideally, a persona balances seeing the bigger picture of your customers’ life while keeping grounded on the context of how they relate to your product or services. This can sometimes take practice, but the better your research, the easier this will be.
A good persona includes the following:
Name - can be a first & last name like Alex Martinez, or a reference name like Alex the Environmentalist.
Age - you can use a bracket if you prefer but keep it tight, say 5-10 years
Where they live - suburb or town is best, add state and country if needed.
Profile picture - a visual representation age, personality, profession etc.
Socio/economic bracket - eg. middle class, working class, wealthy, disadvantaged etc.
Job/profession - where do they work and in what role? Describe the type of organisation if applicable. If they are a student or between jobs then that is important too.
Family or relationship status - this helps to hone in on motivations
Interests & values - what do they like to do?
Motivations - what matters to them?
Gender identification (where applicable)
For bonus points you could also include:
Short biography
Personality*
Computer, Internet, and Media use
A typical day
Ambitions
Favourite brands, TV shows books/magazines
Favourite places/Where they hang out - in real life and online
Quotations of things they might say, opinions they might hold.
*A note on personality: There are a few ways you can do this, either descriptive words (eg. quiet, funny, ambitious, opinionated, conservative, cheerful) or use a sliding scale (eg. lighthearted v serious, follower v. leader, thrifty v luxurious, serious v lighthearted)
Template:
Here is a simple template for you to fill out and help create your user persona: template link