User personas: What they are, how they can be useful and tips

Before building our system, whether that is a website, a mobile application or any other kind of software, we need to first design it. During the design stage, it is essential that we understand how our users perceive and interact with our system. This not only helps your company to possibly sell more products or attract users to your system, but it also provides the best possible experience to your users. Thus, in order to understand your users, you need to create user personas. User personas can be created both before the creation of your system, as well as afterwards, for improving the quality of your user experience!

What is a user persona?

A user persona is a written representation of your target audience that is produced after understanding your users either through research, or observation or both. The persona that is created contains information about the user including ethnographic and occupational information as well as a description of the user’s skills and goals. Depending on the purpose for the creation of the user personas, there may exist more than one user profiles, which means that there is a need for the creation of more than one persona.

How can a persona be useful to me or to my company?

A user persona allows designers to focus on creating a product that is targeted directly to the profiles of the user personas. This decreases the number of users that a designer has to think about when building a website or a mobile application or any kind of software.  A persona can help in understanding the expectations of a user which in turn, unveils desirable features for the user.

Tips on creating useful and correct personas:

• Conduct a user research:

  1. Ethnographic research, which helps us understand the motivation and the users’ problems. This research will also help us understand the context in which our software will be used.
  2. Create surveys and/or interviews, in order to collect quantitative, qualitative data or both.
  3. As for websites, web analytics provide us with information related to the actions of a user on our website, allowing us to divide the users into several groups depending on the cycle of their actions in our website. In light of this, web analytics may provide us with interesting information but not necessarily rich in quality ones.
  The user research that is to be conducted in each case, may consist of one or more of the aforementioned ways of data collection.

• Summarize the user research: Go through your data and look for common characteristics and action cycles that are similar or the same to most of the users and identify the different personas of your system. Ideally, you would have 3-5 different user personas.

• Prioritize your personas: Now that you have already identified your user personas, it important to recognize which user personas describe best the majority of your target users and put them in an order (primary, secondary etc..).

• Realistic user personas: Write the appropriate descriptions for each one of your user personas, ethnographic information, expectations and motivations with no excess personal information, only if needed.  

To conclude, creating a user persona can be extremely useful, if created correctly. The correctness of a user persona depends on the quality of the user research that will be conducted and the analysis of the collected data in the later stage. Understanding your users plays a very important role towards creating unforgettable experiences for your users!

Figure 1: An example of a user persona that provides ethnographic and descriptive information in regards to the user’s activities.