What are user personas? User personas are representations of a target audience and are an important part of story mapping. These fictional characters can help a business create better content, design more intuitive interfaces, and make better decisions regarding marketing initiatives. They’re the best friends a company never had but wish they did!
What They Do
A persona represents an archetypal customer to identify their needs and expectations concerning a product or service. Personas help designers empathize with users by thinking about them as people rather than just data points on a graph. By doing so, designers can better anticipate what a potential user might need and want out of a product or service.
Why They’re Useful
Personas provide valuable insight into the behaviors, motivations, and goals of a business’s customers, which can help inform decisions across the organization. Creating a persona is a great way to get everyone on the same page regarding what a business is trying to accomplish with its product or service and, more specifically, who the business is trying to target in the first place.
Who Should Create Them
Anyone who works on creating or improving products and services can create user personas, but typically designers, engineers, marketers, and researchers. Content providers also need to be familiar with user personas to create relevant, helpful content that continues the conversation.
How To Create Them
There are four basic steps for creating a persona. If a business follows these steps, it will be well on its way to understanding the people who use its product or service.
Find or Create a Name
Finding or creating a name is the most crucial part of a persona and where a business should spend a lot of time. The name helps humanize the audience and make them relatable. Try to choose a name that’s simple, personal, and easy for people to remember.
Describe the Persona
Once a business has a name, it must understand the user persona. Imagine a character, a person, whom a company wants to use its products or services. Company officials should also know his age, sex, race, and job. Age can help them decide how complex tools need to be for them.
Sex can help them decide on design elements like colors and images used within the product. Race and job can determine cultural differences, which could result in a different experience for the audience. A great way to do this is by using the story mapping technique to create a user story.
List the Persona’s Goals
It’s important to know what the users want and need before a business can meet those needs. It helps to make a list of the persona’s goals, including both their short-term and long-term objectives.
By laying out their goals in detail, a business can understand them better, such as what might motivate them and how they might behave when using the product or service.
Detail Their Needs
Finally, create a list of their needs. While making this list, think about how the persona’s goals might be related to the needs a business is trying to meet. It will give them a better understanding of what the persona wants and how best to serve them.
In addition, different personas might have different needs based on their goals, so it’s essential to create a detailed list for each one.
Conclusion
User personas are a great way to bring customers to life. By creating user personas, a business can better understand its target audience’s needs and behaviors – creating an invaluable connection between the people who use the product or service and those who design it.
