How to create Personas, a step by step guide.

Persona is a simple tool to create your product with a specific target user in mind rather than a generic one. It’s a representation of the real target audience data, gathered in previous research such as user interview.

Remember that every proper Persona bases on reliable data. If you didn’t have anything to start with, take a look at our User Interview guide.

At this point, you should have data from at least five user interviews. Gathered data tend to overlap; it’s where you should look for patterns. You can divide them into Persona for each overlap. For example, in Talebook, we recognized that most designers enter the UX field have difficulties in kicking off their research phase. They lack the knowledge in this field, even if they are killers as visual designers. Therefore, ‘UI Designer’ Persona emerged. We packed all the UI Designers into one persona. Thanks to that, we didn’t have to tag every chunk of further research with multiple users. We use this as a reference for a group of people.

Persona is simply a representation of your most common target audience. It’ll help you standardize needs and get solutions faster.

You can think of it as a theme with your similar users. The folder has its name, photo, and brief description.

In most cases, it’s recommended to restrict personas to four. Each additional one can water down your ability to focus on the most important goals. Remember that the fundamental purpose of the research is to prioritize problems and solutions.

How to create a persona?

Step 1. Take a closer look at your data.

The first step is to take a closer look at your data gathered in Discovery Phase, mainly User Interview. Tag your most essential insights, primarily problems. If you work with a client, you should also account your stakeholder point of view. A persona should reflect business goals, as well. Both the needs of users and business are crucial to creating a balanced and successful Persona.

What if I don’t have time to research real user?

In some cases, you won’t have time or money to interview target users. It’s still possible to create Persona based on your stakeholder insight and competitor analysis. You can take a closer look at competitive products social media and see what kind of people are interacting with it.

Remember that in this phase you should avoid fictional profile. It won’t bring any value to your further process and in some cases, can bring harm.

Before we identified that the biggest struggle in the research field has UI Designers who are just starting in this field and want to develop their early research skills. The most common answers we got were: 

• ‘It’s hard to define the goals of the product.’
• ‘We don’t have any process to kick off a new project.’
• ‘I tried to conduct research once, but I didn’t know where to start.’

It gave us a sign that it’s a perfect persona material.

Step 2. Identify patterns

Once you gather some data to analyze, it’s time to identify trends. It’s time to take a closer look at tagged data to see if overlap emerge naturally. In this point, you should understand that different groups of people have a novel approach to the subject.

For example, in Talebook, after the discovery phase, we identified that most of UI Designer with minimal research experience are looking for step by step guide. On the other hand, experienced UX Designers struggle with reporting results to the stakeholders.

Step 3. Create a Persona

Talebook’s Persona consists of five main elements:

• Photo
• Name
• Description
• Users
• Problems

Let’s take a closer look at each of them.

Photo

Don’t forget to name your personas and upload an image which represents them. It’ll help you to build their virtual identity, and will be easily recognizable by your team. For example, in Talebook photo attached to UX Designer is an older man in turtleneck and glasses. We wanted to emphasize the age and experience attached to this Persona.

Name

Each Persona should have a unique name. It gives it a rational fraction and will help to bring Persona to discussion or any other research material.

Description

A place to summarize your personas. It should include the background of your fictional character, as well as their current desires. What is their primary motivation for using your service or tool? It should consist of several goals and the desired outcome of the user actions.

Problems

Every Persona represents different problems. Add all of them to this section to have a summary of the personal struggle. Try to fill users column first. Talebook will automatically show all problems related to added users.

Step 4. Share it!

Persona has no value if it’s not distributed well within your organization. All your team member should be familiar with your primary Personas. It will help you be up to date with the main problems for your target users and how they differ within disparate groups. Try to share Talebook link with personas to all your team members and try to bring it while talking about the app.

E.g., Once you’re talking about a new feature, think what Tim — your primary Persona would think about it and how it’s in line with his motivations.

In the end

Once you’ve created a few broad personas from the interviews, you can spend as much time as you want to add details through scenarios. You’ll know your users if you speak with them enough. You’ll know what they want because they’ll tell you. However, it takes great skill to extract what they need. Throwing personas into various scenarios will encourage you to think in different perspectives. Therefore, your product will slowly become user-centered and user-driven.

The most important piece of advice that you should remember when creating personas is to never box in your user. They’re multi-faceted, emotional human beings who believe that you’re worthy enough of their time. Treat them as sacred.

Ok. Now it’s time for some practice — Let’s start and smash that button below!