Understand personas

In UX design, personas are fictional users whose goals and characteristics represent the needs of a larger group of users.

Personas can help us identify patterns of behavior in users. These patterns might indicate a common pain point experienced by a group of users.

Personas are fictional, but we don't invent these characters from scratch; we create them based on research. You'll need to do research if you want to create a set of personas that truly represent your potential users. As you research, you'll build a picture of who your users are. These will then become your personas.

Generally, creating 3 to 8 personas is enough to represent the majority of a product's users. Think of personas as an overview of all your research and interviews. While it's important that personas accurately represent users, it's impossible to meet all of their specific needs. Personas are also context-specific, meaning they should focus on the behaviors and goals of the users who're effectively interacting with the product.

You can use the information in personas to create designs that speak directly to users. This ensures that users have the best experience with your product. It's recommended to get your team's opinion about the product's users before creating personas. After creating personas, review your team's suggestions and compare them to the personas you created. Point out the ways in which the data confirms or contradicts their suggestions. Everyone on your team needs to understand the personas to truly connect with your users.

Create personas

First, you need to figure out which user group our persona represents. A user group is a group of people who've similar interests, goals, or concerns. Now that you have identified a solid user group, you can create a persona to represent that group.

When creating the persona, we should include their photos and a brief biographical sketch. sInclude things like age, occupation, hometown, marital status, and other demographics that will give us a better sense of our user group. Remember, every persona you create makes a user group more human to your team.

You want to create a persona that represents every major user group, and that will take time. Is it worth it to create so many personas? The short answer? Absolutely.

Personas encourage empathy and put a face to the user. They help humanize our users. They give stakeholders a clearer idea of who their users really are and make the user experience more meaningful. That's the power of personas.

Personas create empathy and tell stories. But why do you need a whole set of personas? Well, one persona isn't enough to tell all sides of a design story. All user groups should be vividly represented. This shows stakeholders the diversity of their user groups and allows you to test features with them. This leads us to the third reason why personas are worthwhile. Personas are a stress test for designs. Personas ensure that we designers are creating something that benefits a wide range of users.