A foundational understanding of your company’s user persona is essential to staying competitive and adapting products to meet user needs. A comprehensive user persona gives you a deeper understanding of your specific user (or users) and what they get from your products.
In this post, we guide you through creating a user persona step-by-step and provide a user persona template to streamline the process.
What is a user persona?
A user persona is a fictional character representing your products’ users. It provides your product team with key insights, such as a user’s characteristics, needs and behavior patterns.
Compiling this information gives you insights to tailor your products or develop new offerings.
Establishing a humanized persona helps your development and design teams better understand and empathize with your typical user.
User persona template for download
If you have multiple products or serve various target groups, it might be helpful to create several user personas and store them in a user persona template that your team can easily access.
We’ve designed a downloadable buyer persona template that can help you organize your user personas. It includes a table to collect demographic and professional data, personal characteristics, pain points and your personas’ goals.
Better understand your customers with our Buyer Persona Templates
How is a user persona different from a buyer persona?
User personas and buyer personas are often confused, but there is a subtle difference:
User personas portray the people who use your product
Buyer personas portray the people who buy your product
At first glance, these might seem identical, but a buyer isn’t always the user. For example, a CEO might buy a company’s sales CRM, but it’s the salespeople who use it every day.
The buyer persona represents the person who makes the purchasing decision at the end of the customer journey (in this case, the CEO). The sales reps who use the software reflect the user persona.
In the B2C sector, user and buyer personas often coincide. In B2B, they’re more frequently distinct individuals.
Why you need a user persona
A user persona helps you understand your target audience, enabling more effective products, sales and marketing decisions.
A product is successful when it helps users with a specific challenge or solves a problem. For example, CRM software helps coordinate marketing and sales tasks, close more deals and enhance the user experience.
Functionality isn’t the only success factor, though. A product should also be intuitive, have a user-friendly UI design and meet users’ additional needs.
Developing and reviewing user personas can ensure your product aligns with user expectations.
A user persona consolidates your target audience’s critical challenges, desires, preferences and behaviors. It should answer questions like:
What characteristics do product users have?
How do they behave? In what situations do they use the product?
What goals do users have with the product?
What excites them about products?
What challenges do they encounter while using the product?
How can the product be improved, or is it reasonable to develop an entirely new product to support users better?
Market research can help you answer these questions and take a data-driven approach to creating customer personas. Let’s look at the specific steps that will help you get started.
7 steps to create a user persona
An impactful user persona should be as realistic as possible, based on factual information about your target user.
Use the following guide and our free user persona template to create your user persona:
Step 1: Assemble a team to pinpoint users
Create a diverse team to help you understand your users.
Your user persona will likely represent a variety of product users. To capture a complete picture, include people from different teams, including sales, customer service and marketing, in the creation process.
Each team can offer a different perspective on the type of user that uses your product, why they use it and their experience.
Step 2: Brainstorm ideas about your typical user
Brainstorming helps you gather insights from your team of experts and gives you a starting point for developing a persona.
The people on your team deal with your customers regularly, so they’ll have valuable insights into who your users are and how your product solves their pain points.
Here are some tips for successful brainstorming:
Gather everyone to discuss ideas. Meet either virtually or in person.
List the characteristics and needs that set your users apart. Jot down suggestions on a whiteboard, note-taking software, Post-It Notes or any system that works for you.
Make sure you hear from everyone. Team members from different departments will have different suggestions, as they interact with your user group at different points in the customer journey.
Consider different types of users. For instance, a marketer and a customer service rep might both use a smartphone. The marketer needs social media apps, and the customer service rep might prioritize a messaging service. Yet, both use the same device. The question then becomes: what are the common personality traits among users?
Look for patterns. Note what users have in common to form a concrete picture.
Note: If you notice significant differences between types of users, you may need to create multiple personas. To make the design process easier, create them one at a time.
Step 3: Gather information from your target audience
Do market research by talking directly to your target audience or interviewing existing customers about their experience.
Collecting data from these primary sources further ensures your user persona reflects your audience, their pain points and their goals.
Your ideal customer can offer real-life examples of how, when and why they use your product. They may also suggest things you hadn’t considered that could help you stand out.
Some ways you could collect data include:
User interviews
Case studies
Technical reports if you sell a device or software
Use your research methods to get valuable insights into your typical user’s life, including the following.
Professional data | What’s their job title, salary, work experience and typical tasks? |
Demographics | What’s their age, gender, location, education, marital status, etc.? |
Pain points and problems | What challenges do they face at work? |
Goals, wishes, needs and dreams | What do they want to achieve at work? |
Personal characteristics | What are their likes and dislikes? |
Daily routine | What does their typical daily routine look like? |
Note: The most relevant information for your user persona depends on your target users. For example, professional data matters more than demographic data for B2B customers.
The key to accuracy is ensuring your user persona is based on real-world research.
Step 4: Develop a biography and usage scenarios
Use your collected data to create a biography for your user persona and generate typical use cases.
The story you create will help you understand your users and their challenges, putting you in a better position to solve their problems and communicate about your product.
Write a brief bio for your user based on the information you’ve gathered.
Some people find it helpful to name their user personas to make them easier to refer to. You can also choose a photo to represent them and create a short statement about their challenges and goals to further bring them to life.
For instance, the following user persona example includes a name and a face.
At the end of this process, the persona should feel like a real person. If someone asks, “How would David like the product update?” your team should have a clear image in mind, improving decision-making.
Once you have a biography, define typical usage scenarios (also known as use cases) in which the user persona uses your product. Answer these questions:
When does the persona use the product?
Where do they use it?
How exactly do they use it?
Understanding how your user base engages with your product will direct future product design decisions, ensuring you maintain crucial functionality and meet customer needs.
Step 5: Validate and refine your user persona
Before finalizing your user persona, run it by stakeholders such as your product or design teams. This persona directly impacts how and why a UX designer makes a decision, for example, so it’s essential to get their input and buy-in before it’s finalized.
If you need to make changes, use real data and user stories to update your persona profile and keep it as accurate as possible.
Step 6: Start using your user persona
Once everyone is happy with your user persona, it’s time to use it. If you’ve designed it to accurately reflect your user segments, it can help speed up design and marketing decisions.
You can also leverage your user or buyer persona to generate more leads. For instance, you can input data about your persona into the Prospector feature in Pipedrive’s LeadBooster add-on.
Prospector uses the data to gather lead recommendations from a global database of over 400 million users.
Input information such as job title, industry, company size, location and seniority.
Prospector then returns matching profiles.
Select the contact(s) you want from the list and use credits to reveal their information. You can also add them straight to your Pipedrive pipeline as leads or deals.
Step 7: Revisit your user persona periodically
Regularly evaluate your completed user persona to ensure your assumptions accurately reflect real users.
Industry trends and customer needs change constantly, so conducting market research and reading industry publications is important to ensure your user persona is current.
Regular revision ensures your persona will continue to help you with things like product management.
A well-maintained user persona template makes review and revision easier and more efficient.
Final thoughts
User personas allow you to understand your users and develop a better product that fits your target audience perfectly. As a result, your customer satisfaction increases and you remain competitive in the long term.
Get started creating your user persona with our user persona template.
