Beginner’s Guide to Creating User Personas

How to create user personas for a compelling user experience design process.

Angela Huang
DesignApes

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If you have thought about creating product designs, you must have heard of the term personas. Creating personas is a regular practice in user experience design, and it helps designers create the best user experience for the product’s target users.

If you have not heard about this term before and are starting to design the UX for your product, then you should read this article to understand how vital personas are and why you need to start using them.

Photo by cottonbro on Pexels
Photo by cottonbro on Pexels

What Is A User Persona?

A user persona includes information about the users interacting with your product. This document is usually a page long and contains information about the target users, including their background, skills, attitudes, goals, and behavior patterns.

UX design agencies create these personas about their target users to help themselves develop a product design those users will want to use. They can always refer back to the persona and makes changes to the design the users will appreciate. Having this document makes the design process simpler and more successful.

Why You Need To Have User Personas

If you want your product’s design to be successful, you must create user personas and use them during the user experience design stage. Using this document will answer questions like who will use this product? What are they trying to achieve? What are their pain points? And more.

That is not the end of the benefits you can receive when using personas during the designing stage of the product.

Knowing What Direction To Take The Design Of The Product

Designing a successful product is difficult; any experienced UX designer will tell you this. There is more to designing the UX of an effect than making it look attractive. A user persona will help you answer questions about the product’s design and identify what the design needs.

When a designer understands who the product is for, what those users will be using it for, how they will be using it, and why they need to use it, the designer will know what features are the most important and need to be given more attention.

Created by Manal Mirza on Behance
Created by Manal Mirza on Behance

UX designers need to consider all the stakeholders when designing the product’s UX; a user persona will help make this easier. The product’s design needs to consider what the target users want and the business needs.

Communicating Information To Other Designers

Designers can work in teams, and ensuring everyone is on the same page is essential to create a successful product. User personas have important information needed for the UX design, and any designer can take a quick look at the document and know what they need. Everyone needs to understand who they are designing the product for, and user personas help make doing this more accessible.

They don’t just help designers; other stakeholders can look at the document and understand the product and what people need to like using it.

How To Create A Great User Persona

If you want to create a user persona that will be useful and help you make the best user experience design for your target users, then these steps might help you do that. It would help if you created a user persona before starting the designing process, or it won’t be much help.

User Research

You will need to find out your target audience before creating a user persona for them. This can be done by looking at similar products and checking who uses them.

When you know the target audience, you can start finding out why they want to use the product, their pain points, their background, and what design will provide them with the most value.

Persona workshop. Photo by Ant Mace on Flickr
Persona workshop. Photo by Ant Mace on Flickr

User personas typically include information like the name of the persona, an image, their demographics (age, gender, location), their goals, what their pain points are, information about their behavior, and information about their personality.

Find Patterns In The Research

Once the user research has been done, you need to look for patterns. Analyzing the research and finding what users have in common, which of their behaviors are similar and which are different, and trends that show up in the research. All of this will make designing a product’s UX easier.

Creating Scenarios For The Personas

You need more than just having a user persona in the UX design stage. It would help if you created scenarios that users will be in when using your product. These scenarios can be how users interact with the product to achieve their goals.

User scenario card. Created by Chirag Sharma on Behance
User scenario card. Created by Chirag Sharma on Behance

The designers can use these scenarios to understand how users will interact with the product and their decisions. Scenarios should be detailed to help the designers understand what will be needed from them when creating a design for the product.

Conclusion

Creating user personas can be challenging, but using this information should make it easier. There are different tools online that can aid you in creating user personas and scenarios if you need more help.

Good luck!

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