A lot of articles and guides on how to create an effective UX design for a software product mention “sticking to a user persona” in order not to waste efforts and resources on a non-target audience. What is a user persona, how to define it, and how can it help the UX team in finding the best design solutions for a product?

User persona is a fictional character based upon data UX researchers collect in the process of user research at the pre-development stage. In simple words, it’s a portrait of the product’s potential average user that includes both small and major details. It helps to identify what the target audience needs and expects from the product, to define different ways users might use the product and understand their behavioral patterns in order to create a better design that meets the goals of its TA and provides the best user experience possible.

How to create a user persona?

Conduct a thorough user research

Conducting thorough user research is essential for creating relevant user personas. When all the necessary data is collected, classify it into groups depending on common features. Then start creating user personas based on these groups. Avoid making too many groups if the product caters to the needs of a specific type of users, since not all products can be designed for everyone at once.

Create a general fictional image
The point of creating a user persona is to imagine as if you’re designing the product specifically for that fictional user. That’s why researchers should “personify” it by giving them an imaginary name, image and some personal characteristics. At first thought that might seem unnecessary and even weird, but in fact, it helps build the character around the fictional personas and focus on them more throughout the design process.
Add research data
Now it’s time to fill these fictional user personas with actual data based on user research. In particular, including: gender, age, place of living, education level, income level, occupation, interests and any other factors that might play a role in their interest in the product. The more information you have, the more accurate fictional portraits you can picture, which in turn can help make the product more user-oriented.
Add users’ needs and goals
The next step is to define and add what these user personas need and expect from the product based on their mentioned-above characteristics. Any person uses a product with a particular end goal (for example, to order food, to book a hotel, to watch a video, etc) – the end goals of the target audience should define what functionality the product has to offer.
Add interaction scenario
Interaction scenario is basically a scenario of user personas’ journey route through the product. It describes when, where and how a persona would interact with the product, what goals they would pursue and what are the possible outcomes of such interaction. To write a good interaction scenario, you should look at your product from the user personas’ perspective.
Make sure all interested parties agree on the personas
User personas are not something that a UX designer should work on independently. Since they play a huge part in the way the product is going to be built, make sure all interested parties agree on user personas before actually using them. If there happen to be any disagreements with any stakeholders on that matter, it’s important to clear them out before starting any work on the design.
Make adjustments throughout the process
User personas that you’ve created don’t have to stay unaltered. UX design requires flexibility, so they can be revisited from time to time, altered, endowed with some new features or deprived of some no longer necessary ones to make sure they stay relevant.

How to conduct user research for creating user personas?

Creating user personas goes hand in hand with user research – a vital part of UX design that implies studying the target audience of a product and collecting information related to the potential users. It’s implemented by applying various research tools, methods and techniques, but most importantly by building a trustworthy and effective communication between the research team and the participants. UX research is a complex and long process that can be quite challenging, so here are some easy tips that can help make research sessions less stressful and more effective.

Start with the small groups of participants
The first problem that many UX researchers encounter is where to find participants for the research tests. The secret is, in many cases there’s no need to search for a lot of people – it all depends on what type of product the research is conducted for. For example, some general problems can be detected with the help of just a small group of users. Instead of chasing the quantity, it’s more effective to find a few people who are truly interested in the product and are ready to take their participation in the research process seriously.
Only research target users
Users who you recruit for research sessions should strictly belong to the target audience of the product you’re testing in order to get relevant results. Otherwise the research process might end up in collecting irrelevant or biased data based on the opinions of users who are not interested in the product, which won’t help making it better in any way.
Use multiple tools/methods at once
There is a misconception that you should use only one research tool or method during the research session. Оn the contrary, the best way is to mix different tools, methods and approaches in order to conduct a deeper research, look at the problem from different angles and get more informative results.
Provide options/scale ratings where appropriate
Surveys are a big part of research sessions, and even though their main purpose is to get out users’ opinions, there is not always a need to ask users open questions. Provide options or scale ratings where appropriate – it will help speed up the process and make it more organized while still allowing users to express their thoughts.
Rely more on users’ actions rather than words
It's common knowledge that people don’t always do what they say and vice versa. That’s why it’s important to study not only opinions, but also actions of the users, and in case of a noticeable divergence between the two explore the reason for that.
Don’t make reports over-detailed
The results of your research work should be documented in reports that will be presented to the design team in order to share the collected data. Try to keep these reports minimalistic, conveying all the info in a concise manner. Although some details may play an important role in research, making reports over-detailed will only make people waste extra time while studying them. Small details can be documented in a separate document for interested parties to read.

Conclusion

User personas are not just fictional characters, they are a useful tool that helps make the right decisions throughout all the stages of the UX design process. The goal of creating them is to define the product’s target audience and understand its needs more precisely, which potentially leads to making a better product. Insights based on user persona should be applied to practice not only by UX designers, but also by the marketing, product and other teams involved in the process of the product creation.

The role of a user persona in UX and how to create it