In this article, we'll go through the entire process of creating a Persona. Step by step, we’ll be adding new sections until we reach our final destination—one or a few production-ready, insightful Personas. What about a template and examples? Well, there are plenty of them. Let's start!
You can use different criteria for grouping your users or customers into Personas, but remember that the two most common ones are demographics and behavior. Demographics-based Personas work best for such cases when a business wants to use them for targeted advertising on social media, while behavior-based Personas offer you much more. They give you valuable insights into how to improve the customer experience and your product or service in general.
We’ll be using UXPressia’s Personas online tool for creating our Persona based on customers or users (and you can follow the same simple steps for employee Personas or buyer Personas). If you’ve never done it before, this is a great opportunity for you to learn something new in an easy and fun way. Go ahead, get a free account, and build Personas of your own while reading this guide!
Contents
The first thing you should take care of when developing Personas is gathering information about your customers. It's fine to start with hypotheses if you validate them afterward. But in general, without customer/user research, goals, tasks, needs, and pains of your Persona profile will be about your imaginary customers or users, not real ones. Populating your Persona with unreliable data won’t do you any good as you won’t be able to come up with improvement ideas for people who really use your product or service.
So where to look for data about your target audience? There are many sources of data and here are a few to get you started:
When it comes to effective communication, there's no denying that nothing beats the experience of a genuine conversation with real people — your actual customers. While technological advancements have introduced various means of gathering information, such as user screen recordings, online surveys, and other methods, interviews are here to stay. The number of interviews you'll need to do can vary greatly depending on the specific circumstances and objectives.
💡 Expert tip: Interview 5-30 people per role. Each of the roles will be defined by the tasks these individuals perform. You’ll start detecting trends once at least five people answer your questions. And, at some point, you’ll notice that you get very little or no new insights at the interviews. That means that you don’t need any more questions and interviews to identify your customer Personas.
If, for some reason, you cannot interview customers or users, interview people who directly communicate with them instead. These might be customer-facing employees: sales representatives, customer support agents, customer success managers, etc.
💡 Expert tip: Running an empathy mapping workshop with your team will help you reveal existing knowledge and get everyone on the same page.
You might have some ideas about your customers or users. Whether you have done some research in the past or you just know something for sure.
If you’ve been working on a product for a while. You may have enough knowledge to make quite accurate assumptions about your customers or users. Just make sure to back them up with research afterward.
Web analytics tools are a goldmine of quantitative data. So take the best of them 😉 Note that they can provide you with information about how your customers or users act, but not about their reasoning behind these actions. You’ll still need to talk to them to find out their customer/user motivation.
These can be surveys, usability testing sessions, and other sources of data for your CJM to gather the necessary information.
It is essential to keep in mind that you cannot use one Persona to represent your entire clientele. Nor can you base a Persona just on one specific customer you happened to know. It has to be a significant group of customers with similar characteristics, needs, goals, and behaviors.
When it comes to segmenting your audience into Personas, the first thing you need to do is analyze the research data you have collected. Then identify behavioral attributes common to people with the same role (e.g., project managers).
The attributes should describe what affects a person’s behavior in situations when the person:
Once again, a Persona is a collective image, a character that represents a segment of your target audience (TA). It cannot be the face of the entire TA. Nor can it be just one person. You need somewhat of a golden middle.
When you are done with behavioral attributes, define all possible values for each of them and put these values on scales. Just like this:
💡 Expert tip: It could be a scale from 5 to 20, but having about 8-12 scales is typically enough.
Once the scales are ready, put all research participants on each scale to compare them, their behavior and identify patterns.
Looking at the scales, you’ll notice that some people appear on the same or similar places on 5-9 scales. These people constitute a pattern, laying a foundation for your future Personas.
💡 Expert tip: Make sure that every pattern you identify is logical and explainable.
Having categorized your customers into groups, go ahead with developing your Personas.
How many Personas do you need for your project? Read our blog post about choosing the optimal number of personas.
Personas can have different layouts as they depend on your Persona’s type and purpose. The structure of Persona is flexible. For example, some of them may include demographic information, while others would focus on behavioral aspects of this audience segment.
So choose the sections that fit your needs from our ready-to-use set of sections or use a pre-filled template from our rich library of ready-to-go Persona templates (one of them is below).
Adding new profile sections and customizing them to your needs is a breeze:
💡 Expert tips:
… and inside our Persona cheat cards.
Having demographic information in Personas is critical in some cases. Lucky us, UXPressia lets you generate names and photos for Personas, so you don't have to rack your brain for a unique name or photo.
💡 Expert tips:
Write down the most basic things like name, photo, age, marital status, job, income, residence, and so on. You can also introduce custom values using the editor:
In Emma, you may have noticed a green stripe that says "Idealist". In UXPressia, we have this section to describe the type of personality and it's a great way to look at your Personas from a new angle..
Describing the background is our next stop. So, what to do?
Write down everything you know about your Persona’s background. Remember that any tiny detail may lead to valuable insight for your business. On the other hand, avoid unnecessary information that may cause cluttering and confusion. This section should serve two purposes: drive empathy and contain valuable and insight-rich information, and that’s it.
Defining Persona’s goals is extremely important because it allows you to see how your goals align with the goals of your customers or users. Not to mention that if you can meet customers’ needs better.
We’ll say that Emma is looking for great discount offers, cheap deals, and best-value products. While Cynthia wants to see only verified customer reviews and ratings and high-quality product images and videos on the website. And Thomas is interested in purchasing the latest and trending fashion products and services to make his own style stand out.
Finding what motivates and frustrates your users or customers is something you must include in your Personas. Once done, it will illuminate what you can do to win their hearts and loyalty.
In Emma’s case, her pain points may be that she doesn’t want to deal with high delivery charges and taxes. She also wants to know when exactly the coupons she has are due to expire.
Speaking of her motivations, Emma would love to get early access to deals and discounts. Also, she wants to get reminders and alerts for deals and seasonal sales.
What about Cynthia and Thomas? Their motivations and frustrations are different from those of Emma. See the carousel below to compare them.
At this point, we are pretty much done with creating a Persona. But there's still a lot of room for improvement.
In UXPressia’s Personas tool, you can add loads of other sections to describe your Persona in the most detailed way possible. So add skills, touchpoints, tech that your Persona uses, quotes, etc.
There's so much fun your team can have when creating a Persona. And the benefits are endless.
Actually, you can use the AI Persona Maker even at step number one, especially if you need to speed up the creation of personas or want to create better customer Personas by improving or augmenting what you already have.
For instance, AI can help you make your Personas region-specific, come up with feature or brand promotion ideas, suggest business ideas and marketing strategies, structure the information, draw conclusions based on existing insights, and so much more.
Below are some examples of personas generated by our AI:
Now you know the steps to create a Persona from scratch. By conducting thorough research and utilizing UXPressia's Persona tool, you can develop meaningful Personas that align with your target audience's needs and help you gain a deeper understanding of your customers. So, what are you waiting for? Bring your persona to life with us 😉
P.S. Be sure to add our Persona creation guide videos to your YouTube playlist, watch it whenever you get stuck, and maybe share them across your social media for fellow journey mappers to learn from those, too.
