A user persona is a method of customer development originating from UX research, but it has also proven helpful for marketing purposes. When building a user persona, we assign an imaginary person with the characteristics of a real one (or not so real) from our client pool/research participants. It’s not a complete portrait, more of a sketch containing a set of demographical characteristics, personality traits, and interests.
Types of characteristics to consider:
- Demographic: gender, age, etc.
- Social: location, occupation, education level
- Psychographic: interests, behavioral models, places of interest, problems, needs, etc.
How to choose the correct set of characteristics to follow
The short answer would be “align with what you need it for.” If you’re planning an ad campaign – consider platforms and social networks your persona would use holidays and typical working hours in their location. If you’re developing a website, consider devices your target audience might use and content engagement behavior.
Why do you need personas?
The primary purpose of user personas is to organize and structure your target audience-related data. But there’s more:
- Personas help you concentrate on pains/tasks/problems of a specific audience segment clearly
- You can simplify different user scenarios within one campaign or product by combining different personas
- It’s easier to relate on an emotional level to someone with a human form, even imaginary, than with a set of numbers
We’ve touched on the “human form” with the last point in the list above, so let’s elaborate on whether you should humanize the persona you create.
You can and should humanize your personas – name them, try drawing a picture of how they look and think about something unique to them, like admiration for dinosaur t-shirts.
Why, might you ask?
- It’s easier to navigate when there is more than one persona, especially if the product is complex and you’d need to create multiple personas to cover it.
- Again, it is easier to relate to Project Manager Bill compared to Persona #1
- A persona that has an identity to it is easier to develop further. Remember Bill? He’s a Project Director now!
A small hack: using https://thispersondoesnotexist.com, you can quickly generate a unique face for your persona without any privacy-related issues.
Let’s sum it up:
A user persona is an excellent method to get to know your audience better, which works for UX and marketing research.
Next is how to create user personas and what to do if you don’t have any target audience data yet, but would love to develop personas.
Top comments (0)