The Ultimate Guide to Writing User Personas
Imagine you’re designing a vehicle.
There are countless decisions to make when starting that process. How many doors should it have? Should it be manual or automatic? Should it have a backup camera? Does highway mileage matter? What colours should it be available in? Even basic stuff: is it a truck, a van, a car, or a motorcycle?
The only way to begin making the right decisions in order to design a successful vehicle is to understand exactly who you’re making the vehicle for.
After all, the requirements for a vehicle for a 65-year-old rural farm owner are a lot different than that of a 25-year-old urban professional. One might be a heavy-duty pickup truck; the other, a two-door hatchback with Bluetooth capabilities. They’re both vehicles, but their users are completely different and warrant entirely different design choices.
The same analogy applies to the work we do in digital products, be they web apps, mobile apps, or entire software platforms. At the end of the day, we’re making digital products for actual people — and the success of these products depends on our ability to understand the end user, empathize with them, and design something that suits their needs.
User personas, when done properly, do exactly that — which is why they’re an important step of the digital project discovery phase.
What Are User Personas?
Okay, you’ve taken step 1 and are armed with a digital project brief for your web or mobile app. You’ve been intentional in outlining the project: the how, what, why, and when from a macro-level. The next step in your digital project discovery is to take that brief and go further into the who you’re making the application for — and we do that with user personas.
User personas are defined well by Wikipedia:
“A user persona is a representation of the goals and behavior of a hypothesized group of users. In most cases, personas are synthesized from data collected from interviews with users.”
That’s a solid way to define them. User personas are primarily written documents, designed to concisely communicate need-to-know information about the users of the digital product we’re building to designers, developers, comms, and other project stakeholders. The idea is that we can drill down to the key traits and goals that matter most to our core group of users and personify them within this document. Then we can use the personas to guide decision-making throughout the project in a user-centered fashion.
That last point is an important principle that shouldn’t be missed. There’s no point in making user personas if everyone isn’t in alignment with user-centered design as the project methodology. There needs to be true buy-in to the idea that we’re designing the optimal solution for our users — not for our own personal preferences. That’s how we avoid designing a teeny hatchback for a grizzled farmhand.
Doing the Research for User Personas
It’s cool that we understand what personas are and why we’d want to use them. It’s also neat to have a handy template (download below) that aids in the process of creating them. But the single most important part of the user persona process is getting effective and accurate information to actually put in them.
There are numerous methods for getting this information, and deeply held opinions on which methods are proper and which are worthless (after all, this IS the internet we’re talking about). That said, at the end of the day we’re often bound by what’s feasible — time, resources, and budget. All that fun stuff. So let’s explore a few methods of user research of varying effort / cost / effectiveness. Note that we’re just discussing attitudinal research for now; behavioural research for usability studies is another topic for another day.
Interview Primary Knowledge Holders
Often, the key stakeholders of a business — C-level execs, Marketing Managers, etc — have a reasonable amount of knowledge when it comes to their users. In a pinch, when end users simply aren’t available or budget doesn’t allow it, interviewing these people still carries value.
Ask the stakeholders who their top five users or user groups are (you can turn them into personas later on your own time). Write them down across the top of a whiteboard. Then, go vertically through each group and ask the stakeholders questions that will help you complete the persona template, which you can download below. This can be a straight-up question and answer exercise (“What’s the age range of this group?”), or it can be an interactive exercise of some kind (“Write down one goal for this user on a sticky note and place it on the whiteboard”).
Record the session, have someone take minutes, and/or take a photo of the whiteboard. Regardless of how you do it, make sure the information gleaned is captured in an effective manner. Then, translate it into user personas!
Interview Users in Person
If the actual users you’re building the digital product for are available, interview them. There’s no better resource.
Again, the methods of capturing the information are variable and dependent on what’s feasible to you — we’ve done everything from a casual conversation to recorded interviews to sitting with users for hours watching them work. The main takeaway is to ensure you really understand them and get the information you need to make the product a success. Ask them:
- What do you love about this current web app/mobile app?
- What do you hate about it?
- What do you wish the new version had?
- What are the five most common tasks you do day-to-day?
Again, use the user personas template we provide to steer your knowledge gathering. Make sure you understand their role and responsibilities, their goals, their needs when it comes to the product, their frustrations, and how and why they use the current tool. If you’re building a digital product to replace a paper-based process, make sure you understand what works in the paper process.
Send out a Survey
If actual users are not available to interview or the data sample is way too small, creating a short user survey and sending it out to targeted groups via email is a great way to supplement the information needed for effective user personas. Again, this assumes you have email access and permission to contact those users. Design your questions to capture the information needed to understand and create user personas, and do so in a way that’s efficient for the respondents to complete. You can use tools like SurveyMonkey, Typeform, or even good ol’ Google Forms to create the survey and work with the data you get back.
Multiple Sources of Information are Best
Given the limitations of budget, timeline, and resources, try to use all three methods of attitudinal research for optimal effectiveness where possible. The more perspectives you get, the easier it will be to create effective, well-rounded personas — personas that aren’t too heavily biased towards a singular opinion or data source.
