What is a user persona?
A user persona, also known as a customer persona, is a comprehensive description of a company's ideal customer. They're often used by marketing teams, sales teams, and designers in order to determine what kind of person would purchase their product or service. User personas are key tools in design processes and marketing strategies, ideally resulting in useful and successful products. 🙏
Don't be afraid to be specific in your persona development. You can always edit and modify your user personas later on.
The components of user personas vary depending on customer base, company needs, and market research but often include the following:
- Demographic information such as name, age, gender, income, education, and location.
- Personal information such as name, job title, company, job description, marital status, and number of children.
- A short biography. Use this section to bring out personality traits & even photos. 👋
- Goals & motivators. Make sure that those listed always connect back to your product or service. For example, if you were selling a vegetarian cookbook, your user persona's goals might include reducing their meat consumption or learning to cook more delicious vegetarian recipes.
- Pain points. Think about your ideal customer's annoyances, problems, and even fears. This information will help you market a truly useful product that responds to demand.
- Favourite brands & products.
Pro Tip: Think about adding industry-specific information. If your product or service is tech-related, for example, persona examples might include favourite social media channels or general tech abilities. 💻
What can a user persona do for me?
User personas are incredibly useful tools because they...
- Are vital in achieving optimal user experiences. Done correctly, customer personas will help you design and market highly desirable products that respond to pain points and fulfill target market needs.
- Provide a great opportunity for collaboration. Use customer personas as an opportunity for diverse team members to work together and brainstorm. If the design team and the marketing team start working together at this stage, they'll be on the same page throughout the development process.
- Help create strong marketing campaigns. User personas are strong bases for potent, targeted marketing campaigns, acting as tools to help you segment your content marketing.
Pro Tip: Top marketing campaigns are often based on a series of unique marketing personas. 🔥
- Are highly informative. A lot of hard work goes into putting together excellent user personas. This includes both market research and user research. However, the data and insights collected from this research are often incredibly useful to various aspects of your business, particularly in relation to marketing strategies.
Slite's free user persona templates
Want to begin developing your own user personas but aren't sure where to start? Slite's got your back! Our user persona templates look sleek, are 100% customizable, encourage team collaboration... and did we mention that they're free? You couldn't ask for a better starting point!
We can't wait to see the persona examples that you come up with. 😍
How can I get started?
Get started developing your customer persona template by:
📂 Conducting User Research
User personas aren't real people, but they're based on real people. The best customer personas are based on real customers and put the experience into UX. Interview as many real customers as you can and condense your findings into one (or a few) user personas.
Not familiar with user research? User research consists of interviews with real customers about your product or service.
This will provide you with an accurate impression of your customer base and help you put together pertinent and comprehensive user personas.
💭 Deciding On Your Focus
You can approach user personas from many different angles. Your industry will have a big influence on this. For example, tech industry user personas often focus on things like preferred apps and tech abilities, whereas fashion industry user personas might include topics like sustainability, shopping habits, and style preferences.
Other common user persona differentiations include goal-directed personas and role-based personas.
📢 Brainstorming Your Persona(s) With Your Team
Gather all the key team members involved in your project and brainstorm your user personas together. Base your ideas off previously conducted user research and make sure that all parties involved agree on the results.
...voila! You'll have created ideal user personas for your business in no time. Your customers had better get ready for an unbeatable UX experience! 😉
