A persona is a user archetype you can use to help guide decisions about product features, navigation, interactions, and even visual design. This archetype is not a real person, but a synthesis of facts and observations about real users that leads to a memorable character.

Research for Personas

• Internal interviews – Begin by learning what your company knows and believes about its existing users and target audience by conducting a few short one-on-one interviews with stakeholders and experts.
• Research with participants – Most of the data you draw upon to create personas should come from qualitative research with individual users or potential users. Structure the interviews or field visits around people’s entire experience with your product or service, not around specific tasks.
• Market research review – Sales and marketing often have detailed demographic profiles and market research that can give you big-picture breakdowns of your audience. If you have market segmentation—usage data or other behavioral data—it’s worth consulting. But don’t just make personas that reinforce market segments.
• Usage data and customer feedback review – Consult customer forums or community sites and support systems for frequent user questions and problems, which can provide supporting data for making this information part of your personas.

Analyze the data:

• Look for patterns in your interviews and usage data and consider what aspects of your users tend to drive their goals and needs. First, find attributes that matter to the selection and use of your product. Then, identify those that distinguish different subsets of users from each other.
• Prioritize attributes and patterns
• Frequency of use – The types of people who use your product more often should usually take precedence over those who use it only rarely.
• Size of marke – How large are the groups of people represented by each pattern?
• Historic or potential revenue – How financially important are each of those groups?
• Strategic importance – Who are you trying to reach? Current customers? Your competitors’ customers? Power users? Are you trying to move into a new market or make more of an existing audience?
• “The magic question.” – Who does your team need to make “ridiculously happy” for the product to be considered a success?
• Define your personas

Using Personas

• Prioritize
• Document
• Share
• Develop with personas
• Regularly update