Effective Personas

Personas represent the target customer or user for your research. A compelling persona helps designers keep in mind who the target audience is for your product and why it is useful. The purpose of personas is to create reliable and realistic representations of your key audience segments for reference. Several online tools, such as Xtensio, are available to create personas with some helpful templates. Most templates contain a photo, fictional name, and goals.

Personas are fictional characters based on natural characteristics. As a result, it is best to pick a random profile picture for your persona instead of someone well known. A stock photo helps keep in mind that the user is a genuine everyday customer. Formulate your personas based on the collected data and research. Personas keep the team on the same page and can be helpful for usability testing and product design. Each persona should be limited to 1 page. Consider user needs, wants, and constraints when formulating a persona. Designers create anywhere from 3 to 5 personas for a project and include motivations, influences, goals, and customer frustrations.

Personas are formulated at the beginning of the project and help focus and guide the team. They could be detailed or quite broad and include a fictional name, age, occupation, and gender, including a quote to sum up how the particular user might relate to your site. Avoid humor when creating a persona. When looking for an image for your persona, make sure it is a real color picture of a person in action. While a headshot image is acceptable, an ideal image shows the user’s expression and activity.

To get a better idea of the type of visitors for your site, ask or discuss the following questions or topics:

1. What are the goals and purpose of your site?
2. What are the age, gender, and education level of the typical user? The consideration here is the demographics of the customers.
3. What is the person’s professional background?
4. What are the user’s needs, interests, and goals for visiting the site?
5. What social media sites does the user follow or use regularly?
6. What devices does the customer use to access the site or online information in general?

The usefulness of personas and whether to create them at all is debatable. Because they’re abstract, personas have been misunderstood and misused over the years. They get created and they often fail for a number of reasons. The primary purpose of a persona is to help design teams have a meaningful or noteworthy user profile. A persona represents a single user type created from research data highlighting specific details rather than an entire user group.