How to create user personas [with examples]

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It covers everything you need to know in one succinct page.

What should a good user persona include?

There’s an endless list of elements you can include depending on your business and goals. At the very least, every user persona should include these characteristics:

Name

Give a name that sounds like a real person, not something like “Jackie of All Trades” which sounds more like a cartoon character. 

Photo

Put a face to a name. Avoid celebrities or known characters as this can form stereotypes or preconceived ideas. Show the individual in a typical user environment that gives insight into where your product or service fits into their life. A dad might be at his home office, a student in the classroom, and so on. 

Bio

Write a backstory for your persona. Summarise their history, how they spend their time, why they do what they do for work, and add some unique traits. This requires you to put yourself in their shoes and look at life from their perspective.

Demographic information

Including details like where they live, age, family status, job and level of seniority, education and more. 

Here’s a sample from HostGator, which describes Jill Anderson as a 35-year-old regional director, single and lives in Portsmouth.

Personality traits

Do they love a challenge? Are they fearful and nervous or impulsive and bold? Think about the personality traits they have. For B2B, you can include workstyle traits, such as “enjoys negotiation; data and facts driven”.

You can approach the personality section in a few ways:

1.   Myers-Briggs. Include information about your persona’s Myers-Briggs personality type, so you can see how they view the world. There are 16 potential user personality types. 
2.   Descriptions. Just give a description of how they are in real life. 
3.   X-Y Axis. Give a sliding scale of traits. Where are they in the range of extroverted and introverted? Creative or analytical? See how this example shows a sliding scale of personality traits. 

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Interests

How do they spend their time? This can be integrated into their bio. 

Motivations

Understand how your customer thinks. What motivates them to take action? Are they motivated more by fear or growth? You can use a sliding scale here to visualise data. 

This example from Universe User Personas outlines Drew’s motivations, core needs and pain points clearly:

Goals

Highlight goals that your persona may have that relate to your product/service and outside the realm of your product or service. What is their end goal with the product? What are their life goals?

Take a look at how this example lists the goals of Dragana Draganovic:

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Frustrations

Highlight their pain points. Question things like: What is preventing your persona from achieving their goals? What concerns do they have? This section will prove critical when it comes to honing your design, so you can meet the needs of customers.

Pro Tip

You’ll notice that in our example personas throughout this article, not every persona has the same elements. That’s because personas are unique to the business or brand that creates them. 

There are plenty of extra characteristics you can include that you might not find in a user persona template. Your goal when creating personas is to ensure yours are relevant to your business and the products or services you are designing, which means you can add and remove elements from the persona template as needed.

Some additional elements you might want to include:

• Preferred channels. 

Where do they spend their time? Include details of social media platforms, websites, browsers and apps they use in their day-to-day. Web data and analytics will help you here.

• Motto. 

Summarise your persona in a simple motto that they might say. 

• Favourite brands and influencers. 

What brands do they buy? Which influencers do they follow?

• Favourite books, magazines, podcasts. 

What media does your customer base consume? What does their typical bookshelf look like? What type of music or podcasts do they listen to? What type of television do they watch?

See how this example for a music app includes favourite bands and favourite music related platforms:

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How to create user personas

“Personas, like all powerful tools, can be grasped in an instant but can take months or years to master.” – Alan Cooper

There are lots of methods to create user personas and they all rely on lots of user research.

According to specialist in personas, Dr Lene Nielsen, there are 10 steps in creating a persona. She explains in her Interaction Design Foundation encyclopaedia article, Personas, how this is the ideal process but it is not always possible to include all the steps in the project. 

Below is an outline of Nielsen’s steps:

1.    Collect data. 

The first step is to find as much knowledge about your users as possible:

Interview and survey existing customers 

Use focus groups and online surveys to get to know real customers across different user types. As Adele Revella, Buyer Persona Institute, said: “If we don’t interview Buyer Personas, we don’t know anything.”

Question the sales and customer service teams 

They are on the frontline and can tell you about the smoothest and toughest sells, customer pain points and the most common questions they’re asked. 

Research on forums 

Go to Quora and Reddit to find common questions and challenges for your target users. Customers use forums to vent, so you’ll quickly see the frustrations and pain points people are experiencing. 

Find people’s social profiles 

Do user research on social media platforms, such as LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram. See people’s interests (personal and professional) and what they care about.

Customer data 

Web analytics, competitive intelligence, customer support logs and social media data can be used to help create the persona and fill in the gaps. 

You might use quantitative data to confirm other information, such as demographics like gender, age and income. Surveys are a good way to do this.  

2.    Form a hypothesis. 

Compile and analyse research findings to form a hypothesis. Use a worksheet to document and collect all data in one place. You should now start to see trends and behaviour patterns in the information. Find a set of people clustering across up to eight variables. These grouping trends will help you bring similar people together and build a picture of each user group to form the basis of each persona. 

3.    Everyone accepts the hypothesis. 

Share the user groups you have so far with project team members and other stakeholders and question them to see if everyone agrees.

4.    Establish a number. 

Decide how many personas you will create based on your hypothesis. Do you only need one persona? Or four? You want to cover all bases here of your top personas and avoid creating variations of each others.

5.    Describe the personas. 

Bring everything together and describe your user persona. Don’t just list facts and features ; weave those facts into a detailed representation of who this persona is as a person. Use stories to provide context and a deeper understanding of who this person is. 

As Don Norman put it: “[personas] only need to be realistic, not real, not necessarily even accurate (as long as they accurately characterise the user base).”

Some valuable advice here is to keep it concise. That way anyone in the company should be able to quickly look at the persona and understand the information. 

6.    Prepare situations or scenarios for your personas. 

Create scenarios that describe solutions, such as a “A day in the life.” You might be describing a number of situations, or use cases, that could trigger use of the product or service. You’re placing the persona in a specific context with a problem they want to solve or goals they want to achieve.

7.    Get acceptance from the organisation. 

Involve the project participants to get their acceptance of the personas. Their buy-in is incredibly important, as the whole business – not just the design team – should be able to benefit from using personas. 

8.    Disseminate knowledge. 

Share the personas across the business. Put them into design so they can be shared in an easy-to-digest way. Use illustrations, icons and design elements to highlight persona information, make it memorable and visually engaging.

This user persona example shows how design can make an impact:

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Think about design features that will make it easy to compare the persona groups, for example you might use sliding scales to define user traits, such as whether they are adventurous or risk-averse. 

This example from designer Martha Eierdanz shows how the information is consistent between personas, so it’s easy to compare them quickly. Pay attention to the clean design features, including simple iconography.

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9.    Everyone prepares scenarios. 

A persona is only a valuable business tool if you create scenarios that put the persona in the story.  Scenarios fill in the “why” behind the “who” – they are stories about the persona using whatever has been designed to achieve the task or goal (such as a website or app). 

For example, a scenario might tell the story of how persona Sarah uses an app to make a pet insurance claim. Scenarios can vary in level of details, but should always outline ‘who’, ‘what’, ‘when’, ‘where’, ‘why’, and ‘how’. 

10. Make ongoing adjustments.

The thing about user personas is that they might never be “done”. Continue to add to them, refine them and iterate as much as you need to get value from them. You might need to rewrite personas, create new ones or get rid of outdated ones as your end users and business evolve. 

Best practices for building user personas for UX design or product design

1)    Get stuck into the details. 

Take a good look at everything you can find around your target audience and their user needs when you research and create a user persona.

2)    Don’t expect to know all the answers immediately.

Start with what you have and go from there. You can fill gaps as you go. 

3)    Focus on the motives behind behaviours. 

Pay attention to not just what someone is doing, but why they’re doing it. When doing research and building a persona, look at why someone is using a particular product, looking for a specific solution, or trying to reach a certain goal—and not just the tools, solutions, or goals themselves.

4)    Keep personas fictional, but realistic. 

Don’t define your persona by describing one real person – no one person can embody all your target audience. Remember, personas are semi-fictional characters.

5)    Choose one primary persona. 

All other personas are secondary. Focus on researching, creating and targeting your primary persona first.

How many user personas do you need?

Very few businesses only target one audience for their product, so chances are you’re going to need to create more than one user persona. But be careful you don’t fall into the trap of trying to capture everyone by creating dozens of user personas. The more you create, the more they overlap and resemble each other, and the less value you will get out of the process. 

For this reason, we recommend limiting yourself at four user personas. Four is more than enough to give you insight into the majority of your audience segments. If you only need one, only create one. 

Make one of these the primary persona, and follow the rule “design for the primary – accommodate the secondary.” 

Final thoughts

User personas are powerful tools. The end goal is to really get to know your users, giving you insights that can help inform and guide the product development process.

Take the time to do them properly and you can add value at every stage of the design process by ensuring the person is kept at the heart of every decision. But their value goes beyond UX. Once you have created your user personas, share them with the business, so they can be used to create experiences, products and services that people love.

For more help with your user persona template and creating user personas, contact our team.