User Persona Templates That Will Make Your Life Easier

Published in

UX Planet

8 min readJul 15, 2019

You can’t promote a product if you don’t know some basic things about your target audience. To this end, you have to analyze all the different types of people who are interested in your offerings and learn to present the product in an appropriate light.

The easiest way to conceptualize your target market is to create user personas. Whether for an app or a real physical product, you will need to create a persona that tells a few things about the intended user of your product at a single glance.

All people involved in the process of developing a product’s image should know how to use the persona template you have created to ease the course of their work, be it in marketing or user experience design.

Keep reading more about this topic in this article created by our team at Amelia and find more information about what a user persona is and how user persona templates can help you.

What Is a User Persona?

Before explaining why you would need user personas, let’s first define the term itself. User personas are conceptual representations (i.e. models) of who your target audience is. Designing a user persona requires a lot of research and analysis of your audience’s goals, behavior, desires, and more.

Regularly, the following criteria are analyzed:

The goals of your audience
The background in which your audience lives
Your audience’s age and gender
The behavior and habits of your audience
The pain points and needs

Besides the obvious benefit that you will get to know your target audience better so that you will be able to launch products that are more suitable to their needs, you can also build a user persona that works to boost sales on existing products.

Research is important in all given situations when you own a business, so you really can’t skip this step regardless of what your purpose is. Even if it doesn’t help you with an already low-performing product, it will at least help you take wiser marketing and design decisions in the future.

Why Do People Need User Personas?

You may ask yourself why anyone would need a user persona to begin with, especially professional designers or marketers who already understand their audience pretty well.

The fact is, in today’s world of hyper-relevance, simply knowing ‘just enough’ about a particular target audience doesn’t cut it anymore.

Instead, you need to focus on highly-relevant, human-centered content and design that will resonate with specific groups of users and their particular use cases, else your products run the risk of falling flat for everyone for uses them.

If you have no idea where to start, you can use a persona template that suits your business specifics. The main goal of using one is to make people who visit your website feel something and get engaged with your content and website. The content needs to fully appeal to the user’s needs and be relevant from start to finish.

The more specific your user persona is, the better chance you have to turn visitors into actual clients. As such, you need a persona template that suits your business and which convinces your audience that your brand is the best in the niche.

Ultimately, your user persona will help you establish an emotional connection between your business and the target audience.

What Should Your User Persona Design Include?

If you don’t know many things about user persona design, you should first focus on target audience research to draw out your audience’s needs, desires, goals, and frustrations.

Simply put, you have to tell a story using your brand, a story that is meant to touch the users emotionally and make them feel like your product was made just for them. Your user persona will express your users’own traits, goals, and dreams.

Those who will use the user persona in crafting relevant content or outstanding user experiences need to feel like your user persona is an actual character that plays the main role in a very complex story.

Below you will find a list of user persona templates that should inspire you, regardless of the domain of your business. Find one that suits your needs best and feel free to customize it based on what you yourself have learned about each persona and how they relate to your products.

Once your persona (or personas) has been shared among all stakeholders (e.g. designers, marketers, content creators, etc.) your business will change for the better in an instant.

Keep in mind that without target audience research, you won’t be able to meet the expectations of your users, so remember to put in some legwork here and add your own insights accordingly.

User Persona Template Examples You Can’t Miss

UX Designer

The list starts with this template of a UX designer persona which illustrates the basic concept of a user persona extremely well. This template contains information related to the target audience based on age, personality, goals, motivations, frustrations, and other details.

As for aesthetics, we can notice a very colorful photograph that rapidly stands out from the rest of the design, which demonstrates a vigorous personality and a certain type of lifestyle. Thus, even a single image can tell you a lot about this kind of user.

In this example particularly, the motivations are placed in the center of the page, to guide the reader towards understanding the goals and behaviors that the ideal user adopts. The motivations are a map to the aspirations of the created persona and are useful in understanding what this kind of user cares about more generally.

The Nerd

This persona template is just as impressive and bold. Ctrl Metrics is a minimal template that focuses on emphasizing a photograph that has one sole purpose: listing adjectives and nouns that describe the targeted person in the most succinct way possible.

Ctrl Metrics is a template that highlights the nerdier side of a larger audience, as the name of the user persona says — Nerdy Nina. The template doesn’t stop there, as the nickname is combined with a powerful quote, which end users might largely identify with and which can elaborate on a certain mindset.

The Researcher

Referral Saasquatch is a persona template that shows the kind of user who loves to do their homework before taking action. This user persona sums up the characteristics of a wise decision maker that seeks out the full story on any matter.

This is a one-page template where content is separated into columns. This template is less desirable because the content is more difficult to read. Compared to Ctrl Metrics and UX designer, this template is oriented towards dense information.

Regardless, the style of this template is nicely representative of the target user as a whole.

The Manager

Even though it might seem quite crowded, the Fake Crow template is exactly what you need if you want an impactful user persona for managers. This persona template is attention-grabbing and aesthetically pleasing while speaking to the confident personality of a team leader.

You get everything combined beautifully and in the right order -listed goals, frustrations, and motivations. The graphical representations of each of the points presented in this template make it easier for the reader to understand this type of user at a glance.

The Health Advocate

This persona template is pretty straight-forward. You can easily tell that the person who is represented there is a middle-aged woman, the proud mother of two children. What is even more evident is that this user persona focuses a lot on food — healthy food, to be precise. Without even reading the text, the viewer can tell where the story is going.

The short quote included in the template reinforces the core objective of this user persona — encouraging mothers to adopt a healthier diet for their kids. This persona template presents a modern character that likes to adapt to changes and become a fashionable consumer.

The Influencer

Another perfect example of a buyer persona template, Universe User Personas makes great use of color and contrast to emphasize the dynamic yet cool-and-trendy personality type involved.

The persona is presented visually, using a bold photograph that is meant to transmit the idea of a strong personality, a voice that can be heard at any given moment — the influencer.

The Mom

A very basic template example for a family-focused persona, Rachael the Stay at Home Mom is minimal in terms of content. In this case, Rachel is presented in the simplest manner possible, emphasizing the plain and simple needs of a person who wants stability and simplicity.

She has the basic problems that any mother would face at some point in her journey — the lack of time, financial problems, stress, etc. All she needs is a simple, trusted solution to help her cope with everything easier — nothing fancy required.

The Designer

Xtensio’s Interior Designer user persona template deserves a place in this list because of its boldness and clarity. This is a neat, well-designed template that makes great use of contrast and loud colors.

This persona template is all about grabbing attention fast and keeping it for as long as needed, clearly demonstrating the creative designer mindset.

Generic Persona

Finally, if you have no idea where to start and what kind of user persona template to use, you can follow this great example given by Piktochart. This template demonstrates the essentials of a user persona and briefly describes why each section is included in the template itself.

Ending thoughts on these persona templates

You can either choose to follow the examples of persona templates from the ones presented above or create your own from scratch.

Either way, use the inspiration you’ve gained from these excellent template examples and combine your own audience research and insights to craft something you can share with your team. It might take some work, but your colleagues and your users’ will thank you for it.

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Originally published at https://wpamelia.com on July 15, 2019.