What is a User Persona?

A user persona is a characterization of an average user or customer who will interact with your software product. When talking about user personas, we are talking about archetypes of the typical kinds of people who will be using the product. A buyer persona is a semi-fictional character that represents your ideal customer.

Creating it requires careful work that includes market research, customer data that you already have, and even some assumptions. Once you build your persona’s profile and describe its characteristics in detail, you will be able to understand your audience and address your Marketing efforts to the right people.

After all, if you know your ideal customer “in person”, it is easier to talk to them about things they are interested in.

Users Personas are the ultimate tool to help product teams stay laser-focused on the customer’s needs and the problems your developers are working to solve.

The concept of a User Persona was created by Alan Cooper, a noted software developer, in 1983. He devised a prototype of what the Persona would become based on informal interviews with seven to eight users. Today, a User Persona is defined to be “Fictional characters, which you create based upon your research to represent the different user types that might use your service, product, site, or brand in a similar way” (Dam & Siang, 2020).

Creating personas will help you understand your users’ needs, experiences, behaviors, and goals. You can think of a User Persona as a character study of your target customer. It aids in imagining the target audience as real people and visualizing how the product will fit into their real life. While building your persona, you can include information like:

• Name
• Age/generation
• Location
• Likes and dislikes
• Hobbies
• Aspirations
• Pain points
• Experience
• Education
• Favorite brands
• Leaders they follow

Personas are not the same as stakeholders. While stakeholders are people or groups that have a specific interest in your product and its development, user personas are the people who will actually be using it. While users can sometimes be considered stakeholders, the way we look at users as stakeholders (generally with low influence over the product) is fundamentally different from how we need to analyze them as personas.

There are several different philosophies for how to work with user personas. Some advocate for giving them a name and a picture and specifically defining them as individual persons. However, during the Product Inception process, we like to think of persona analysis as a first date. You can't expect to learn everything about your date over your first dinner together, because you know it will take time to get to know them. We have found that user personas sometimes develop along with your product.