Creating User Personas
Why they are important and what they should include
Personas
What is Persona?
In Product Management, a persona is a profile of a potential customer. Personas help product managers to understand key attributes, challenges, skills, responsibilities, and needs of a specific type of customer. User personas are extremely useful to grow and improve a product. They answer the question “Why should they buy from you?”.
A deep understanding of a potential user is fundamental to creating a product. These personas help the product team to understand who they are creating the product for, and find the answer to the most important question “Who are we designing for?”.
By understanding the needs, challenges, skills, and responsibilities of users it’s most probable to create and design a product that will please users’ needs.
Personas help the product team to create understanding and empathy with the users. Personas will help you to gain perspective similar to users. The more the product team engages with the user personas, they will be able to see them as real people and think like them and create the best product for them.
If an organization builds a product without empathy and a deep understanding of who that product is for, that product is doomed to extinction.
We create products to solve specific problems for specific people, because of that it’s important to understand those people’s needs, what motivates them, what challenges they face every day, what makes their life easier, what motivates them, etc.
What details are important when creating a persona?
- Age, sex, geographic location, and education level
- Socioeconomic status
- Goals & dreams for their both professional and personal life
- Challenges, problems, fears
- How the person deals with the problem without your product
There are different types of personas, such as user persona, buyer persona, decision-maker persona, customer persona.
How to create the best persona for your company?
Create your user persona first, the personas that work best for you are based on real people so it’ll be better to interview real people and understand their problems. The more real-world problems you learn, the more you will be able to better understand the user and create a better product.
Collect information as much as you can about your users, understand their mindset, motivations, and behaviors. Identify their behavior by analyzing the data you have. After that, it’s really easy to create your persona and prioritize users.
You can ask these questions below to create a user persona:
Who are they?
What do these people do?
Are they married, single, living with a partner?
Do they have any children? How many? What ages?
What problems or concerns do they have, that your industry can solve?
How old are they?
Where do they live?
What level of education did they complete?
What is their current job level?
Scooby and Shaggy are the first personas I’ve created for a warehouse future at my current job as a product specialist. Researching takes time — but the whole process was instructive and fun. I’ve done much research and learned lots of things.
I hope this story helps you to understand and create user personas.
