User Personas

UX designers are often met with a hard challenge. Unlike marketers who get to create ads for specific target personas, UX designers have to build products that are often used by many different personas. Where this becomes difficult is that each persona may use the product differently, value different features, or have different levels of understanding when it comes to technology.

That makes for tough decisions. Should you design a hamburger menu for the mobile view of a website? How much information should you include about your product on the landing page? Are your users particularly concerned about security? Are they going to appreciate 2-factor authentication or find it annoying? Do they have different purposes for opening your software in the first place?

As a UX designer, you'll have to learn to weigh the importance of different customer segments to the business and design your products accordingly.

What are user personas?

User personas are fictional representations of your users that help your teams understand who they're building for. Each persona is like a composite sketch of what you know about many individual customers, what jobs they want to get done, and what problems they're having along the way.

Creating a user person

There are a ton of resources online that give you templates to follow when creating your personas. You'll see that subheadings change from source to source and the level of detail asked for varies but they all gather the same type of information (behaviors, beliefs, characteristics, goals, etc.) Here are just a few templates that you can use:

• Lean Personas (by UXPin)
• Data-driven Personas (by ConversionXL)
• Marketing Personas (by Buffer)
• Buyer Personas (by Hubspot)

Building better products from personas

In User Experience, individual characteristics become less and less important as a way to divide users into personas. You should think of personas as groups of users who have the same goal when interacting with your product. In some cases, depending on the product, it may make sense to bring in other characteristics to help create personas but think very hard about this before you do so. Would doing so really change how you would design the product?

No matter what product you're working on, there will almost always be more than one persona that uses the product.

Let's take Mint (an Intuit product) for example. Think of all the different user personas that likely use Mint. More importantly, think about all of the users who use Mint for different reasons. Some users may use Mint solely to check their credit score. Some may use Mint as an easy way to track their transactions and keep a tab on the amounts in their accounts. And still, others may use Mint as a budgeting tool.

Each of those segments have different goals that they are trying to accomplish when they open up the Mint web app or mobile application. The Mint team has worked hard to make sure that given a few common goals that people have when they interact with the product, there's an easy, quick, and non-confusing way to accomplish that goal.

User personas can help you nail down what goals users have when they interact with your product. By knowing what these goals are, you can create designs to make sure that the most important users to the business have a great experience and can achieve their goals quickly, easily, and without confusion when interacting with your product.

User personas give you a centerpiece around which to focus your discussions.

Starting from one of the User persona templates linked above, pick one of the following tech companies and create two user personas for two different user groups you think are more important to that company.

• Venmo
• Slack
• Spotify
• Instagram
• Airbnb