The Anatomy of a User Persona

4 min readMay 27, 2022

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What is a User Persona?

The second stage of the Design Thinking process is to define the user’s needs and problems. Having gathered all the necessary and relevant data during the research process completed in the Empathising stage, we move on to summarising all this data into user personas.

Simply put, a user persona is a fictional representation of your ideal customer.

After conducting user research, we put together the data gathered and build our personas as to include the potential users’ needs, wants, pain points and behaviours.

We say “fictional”, but a user persona is based on real data. We never assume things about our users, so all the information that is presented must be taken from real user research. The reason why we create user personas is to make sure we build for our users, and not ourselves.

Here’s an example of a user persona built for a mobile application aimed to help people contribute easily to solving the climate change issue.

So let’s take each part separately and see what each section is supposed to focus on.

General Information

We start by displaying some general information about our persona, such as:

Name (fictional)
Location (where they are living now)
Age
Job position
Any other detail you feel is relevant to be included in this section.

About

After we look at the data gathered through user research, we can add a text describing the user persona. This way, we build a story behind the persona, which brings us even closer to the potential user base of our product.

Attribute Scale

An attribute scale is very useful when designing a product, as it offers us a more clear overview of our users’ personality traits, as well as level of expertise when it comes to using technology. This way, we ensure we build a product that truly helps people achieve their goals. By recording and summarising this kind of information in a user persona, we create more background for our potential users, which helps us define clearer goals and prioritise feature for our design.

Wants & Needs

When we design for our users, we want to really understand what they want to achieve and what are their needs regarding this. In this case, we can see that our user persona wants to see more involvement from people around her, she wants to act now as best as she can, and needs to raise awareness of the fact that climate change is a real issue nowadays. By understanding this, we can build a clear overview of what we must design in order to help her achieve these goals.

Pain Points

While our target users have certain wants, they also have issues that they have encountered in regards to the topic that you are researching. We call these pain points and they also help define our priorities when building a product. For this user persona, she is frustrated when she cannot find enough information online about climate change, and she feels the effects of climate change through heatwaves, decreasing air quality and much warmer weather. What we can conclude from this is that our product (mobile app in this case) must ensure that our users are able to easily find the information they are looking for when they need it, which would reduce their frustrations considerably.

Reasons to Use Our Product

Another useful section when building a user persona is the one dedicated to reasons for which a person might use our product. Taking this example, Zoe would use this mobile app to find more information about climate change (Remember how she stated that she is frustrated when she doesn’t find the information she needs?), to document herself about the state of Earth’s climate and to see how she can get involved. This confirms our design priorities once again — the fact that our mobile app must offer users all the information they need about climate change and how they can get involved whenever they feel the need to.