User Personas
Meet Your Users—and Their Needs
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What Are User Personas?
User personas are fictional characters that represent specific groups within your audience. Though they don't describe real people, personas are based on facts, research, and your knowledge.
Think of them as a tool that helps you get a generalized but fact-based understanding of a customer group. With that, you can build products and services following data rather than intuition to meet your customers' true needs.
User personas include a lot of details like demographics, goals, challenges, preferences, and fictional bios. To make all this information fast to grasp and easy to work with, user personas are created in a visual format.
Three Ways to Create Your User Persona
There isn't a single perfect method for building user personas. Depending on your goals, time, resources, and target users, you may take one of the three common approaches.
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Starter Personas
Also known as proto personas, this type uses the existing data and knowledge rather than new user research. They are created during internal workshops. Start by asking each participant to draft 2-5 personas based on what they know. Then, discuss them as a group and compile them into 3-6 starter personas.
When to use
Starter personas can be created in hours. This makes them useful when you don't yet have any personas and/or time for detailed research. They can also help you explore and verify hypotheses about your audience. Usually, starter personas are a stepping stone to more accurate, research-driven profiles.
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Interview-Based Personas
A step up from simple personas, this approach requires new interviews on small- to mid-sized sample groups (5-30 people). When recruiting participants, you can start with who you think your ideal customer is, e.g., "tech-savvy daily user, aged 20-35". Look for patterns in the answers, such as shared behaviors, preferences, needs, and goals, and use these similarities to create your personas.
When to use
It's a balanced approach: the interviews take more time than internal workshops, but they give you feedback straight from real-life users. They also provide insight into customers' needs, challenges, and priorities, which you can use to plan the roadmap for your product or service.
Statistical Personas
To create statistical personas, follow interviews up with surveys on large sample groups (at least 100 participants, ideally over 500), focusing on common themes (needs, behaviors, challenges, etc.). Then, use statistical cluster methods to find patterns in the results and group your users.
When to use
Statistical personas allow you to see the share of different user groups in the total client base and make sure that none of them is under- or overrepresented. This approach works best for finding trends in large, specific user segments and analyzing them based on sociodemographic data like age, occupation, or location.
How Can Personas Help Specific Professions?
UX/UI Designers
Customize the look and feel of a website for its main audience. Add new features to a mobile app based on the needs of specific user personas.
Project Managers
Remove ambiguities between teams by giving them the same perspective of your audience. Share personas with new members to help them understand users faster.
Business Executives
Use buyer personas to learn which target groups are the most valuable. Avoid biased decisions. Improve adoption by addressing customers' pain points.
Content Strategists
Build content strategies based on data. Personalize the tone of voice and messaging for specific audiences. Reach users on their preferred channels.
Tips and Tricks for Creating User Personas
Best Practices
- Keep it simple: Use clear layouts, simple language, spacing, and bullet points to make your user personas quick and easy to understand.
- Consider psychographics: Don't rely only on demographic data. Search for patterns in behaviors and preferences to create user personas that feel real, like "problem-solving coding enthusiast", "money-saving business owner", or health-conscious parent".
- Make them actionable: Based on users' goals and needs, include specific action points for your teams, such as "uses several tools each day, needs an easy way to integrate them with our product", or "values simplicity; let's keep the interface minimal".
Common Mistakes in Creating User Personas
- Unnecessary details: Avoid irrelevant information. Include what really matters in your context, e.g., frustrating, repeating tasks if you're building an automation platform or shopping habits for a personal finance app.
- Too many personas: Excessive user personas may be distracting. The optimal number of personas is subjective, but 3-7 should work for most teams.
- Bias and personal opinion: To make personas accurate, create them based on what you know for a fact, not what you think is true. Double-check personas for stereotypes and confirmation bias.
Tips for Creating User Personas in Excalidraw
- Collaborate in real-time: In the free editor, you can invite any number of teammates to create personas together in real-time.
- Use shortcuts: Create personas with fewer clicks. Press R to create a rectangle and Enter to add text. Press ? to see all shortcuts.
- Add links: Support your claims by including links to studies and user interviews.
- Save time with libraries: Use ready-made graphic elements to make personas visually appealing and consistent, faster.
Wrapping Up
User personas represent audience groups and key information like their demographics, goals, and challenges in an easy-to-read form. They help business and product teams understand customers and identify their needs.
Pick an approach that fits your project, follow our tips, and use personas to bring more value to users.
Business Use or Teamwork?
Try PLUS Features
🎙️ Voice hangouts and screenshare: Discuss your personas in real-time without using extra tools.
💬 Comments: Leave and receive feedback and suggestions to improve your personas.
👥 User management: Prevent unwanted changes with read-only share links and editable access and edit rights.
📺 Presentations: Turn personas into slides with a few clicks to present them in meetings.
🤓 Work organization: Manage and group your whiteboards into Collections for different personas and user research results.