Why you need to build Personas?
Alan Cooper first introduced the concept of user personas in 1999 to help inform design strategy. Persona is an actual & realistic representations of your users and is built at an early stages of product development or product redesign. They do not resemble a real person but helps us remember a particular set of goals, motivations, contexts, needs and behaviors that were observed in a user during research. This helps us to design for our users and not us.
Why personas?
Below are few points to explain why.
- It helps in design decisions by taking common user needs and bringing them to the forefront of planning before design has actually started.
- It helps doing task analysis and creating scenarios that help prioritize the need and features which results in a development of a product which is focused on user needs and goals.
- It helps creating more empathy and understanding about the person using the product.
- It also helps everyone to share a consistent understanding of the user group when and consider them while working towards a solution.
What you need for Persona?
Here is a template for persona that I use. Feel free to use it to develop one of your own.

How you build a persona?
- User interviews — talk to people who are using similar product as yours, look for similarities or patterns.
- Talk to your stakeholders to understand customer base They might also connect you with some.
- Survey or talk to your sales team about customers.
Hope this will help you in creating one for your own.
Just a thought: While writing this, I was just wondering that personas are the users we keep in mind while designing products. So, is there a term for people we don’t want to use our products like — negative persona. Just wondering !!
