What is the User Persona template?
Define the goals and characteristics of archetypical users who will represent a larger group of your consumers. Include behavior patterns, their goals, skills, or attitudes, as well as background information in your findings. Add a few fictional details like quotes from real users to make the persona more of a realistic character.
Try to understand your target audience deeply to create an even more exceptional product. With the help of personas, answer the question of who you’re designing for to know which direction you should follow. Get to know your users’ expectations, problems, and motivations to satisfy their needs and become successful.
Shape your product strategy by keeping in mind that a good user persona:
- Is not a fictional guess at what your target user thinks, but the observations and research are backed up with relatable and real data.
- Reflects the real user patterns, not various user roles, and the details you include on your template will be enough to design and build your product further.
- Focuses on how users interact with your product now, not how they will use your services in the future.
- Is set in the context and focused on behaviors or goals related to your product.
What are the benefits of the User Persona template?
Thanks to the User Persona template, you can:
- Treat personas as a common ground for starting a conversation with product designers in your team.
- Build a more meaningful and valuable user experience by showing empathy and a better understanding of the end-users needs.
- Keep your entire organization customer-focused and avoid misunderstandings about who you’re designing for or marketing to.
- Sell your product’s story and explain what it will do after deployment, who will find it helpful, and how.
- Make your personas as guides to designers, developers, and marketing efforts to know who you will reach.
How to use the User Persona template in a few steps?
- Open the User Persona template on a new board or add it to an already existing one.
- Invite your team to the board by sending them an email invitation or sharing the board URL.
- List your research findings and write down what you would like to know about your users on sticky notes or text blocks. You can base it on already existing data if you have any.
- Prepare a survey to gather a mix of qualitative and quantitative data. Include general questions like what product features your users like most, what activities consume a lot of your user’s time, or how they stay in touch with their coworkers. Bear in mind to create questions related to your product or service issues.
- Create a mind map on your whiteboard that will include data you’ve gathered from the survey. Divide the findings according to demographics and usage and check if there’s any correlation between them.
- Work on your user personas by inserting their picture on the ready-to-use template and writing down their characteristics on sticky notes. Describe what this persona is like, specify their personality, and define their goals, needs, and pain points. Keep in mind to make the persona relatable, concise, well-researched, and well-structured.
- Export to PDF or share your board with other teams to take a look at personas when working on new products or features.