What is a User Persona?

Every business has its own target users. These target users are segregated into groups that has similar interests, goals and concerns. These individual group of users are called “User Groups”. A user persona is simply a representation of these user groups.

A user persona is a fictional characteristic that humanizes a larger user group. It has basic info. like name, age, occupation, goals and frustrations and few other details generated from the research. For every user group, a user persona is created so that, it’s easier for businesses to understand who our users are and what do they actually need. It not represents user groups but also gives a human touch to your user groups.

User Persona is created once you know your users and have done some research to understand them. Let’s understand this with an example. Let’s say you want to start an EdTech company. You know your users are college students and working professionals. You did your research and found out that 3rd year Engineering students is one of your potential user groups. You can represent this using a user persona shown below.

User Persona

There are multiple templates for creating user personas. This is just an example of how you can create a user persona. User persona gives a clear picture to your stakeholders about who your users actually are and helps to build empathy. It turns the presentation into a storytelling experience.

Once you’ve created your personas, you should start with user stories. A user story is a one sentence description from a personas perspective to communicate their needs. It’s as simple as any story :

STORY = HERO + GOAL + PROBLEM

You can write a user story using a simple template which goes like this :

User story

User stories help inform design decisions. It clearly states what each type of users need and why. It prevents bad user experiences and help to prioritize design goals.

User persona is an important UX tool which inspires empathetic design decisions and improves overall User experience.