Rebecca BlakistonNutrition profile
Personas are fictional characters that reflect your target audience segments. They inspire empathy, inform design decisions, and get a team on the same page about who you are designing for.
Perfect for
Personas are useful as a starting point to a project to check a team's assumptions and get you on the same page.
Cooking time
You can sketch out rapid assumption personas in an hour or less. Research-based personas will take longer, up to a few months.
Prep work
Choosing your audience segments
Each persona should represent a segment of your audience. You can determine a segment by recognizing which clusters of your audience have similar goals and behaviors when it comes to the service or product you are designing. For example, if you are building a learning management system for a university you might have an "instructor" and "student" persona. If you are designing a study lounge you might have a "collaborative studier" and a "quiet studier" persona.
Avoid creating personas based on demographics, such as age or location. Focus instead on the audience's purpose: what are they trying to do? Why would they use your product?
Avoid having too many personas to remember. We recommend no more than 5 personas per product or service. You also might consider primary vs. secondary personas. For example, an academic library could have:
Primary personas: instructor, student, researcher
Secondary personas: employee, donor
Choosing a type of persona
Assumption-based personas (or proto personas) are based on existing knowledge and assumptions about your audience. They are quick, easy, and imperfect. Their main goal is to get a team on the same page about your users. You can sketch an assumption persona in a 30 minute meeting, or run a workshop to create a set of personas in a couple of hours.
Research-based personas are based on user research data gathered from such methods as user interviews, surveys, web analytics, and focus groups. They take more time but are more authentic and often more useful than assumption-based personas. Research-based personas can be qualitative or statistical, and may take a few weeks or months to create. We usually recommend qualitative personas, which are quicker to create than statistical personas and more reflective of real users than proto personas.
Ingredients
- User research data, including top tasks and quotes
- Photos of people (from royalty-free image websites such as Pixabay or Unsplash, or try ThisPersonDoesNotExist for random, AI-created headshots)
- Writing utensil (low fidelity) or slide deck tool like PowerPoint (high fidelity)
Directions
If you work at the University of Arizona Libraries, try adapting one of our existing qualitative personas, which were based on user research in 2018.
Everyone else, start with our persona template. The components of the template include:
- A name and key audience segment. By giving the persona a name, it will be easier to refer to it in your project discussions. Some people like to use alliteration to make it more memorable (e.g. "Rui the Researcher").
- Goals. These describe the person's overarching professional, personal, or academic goals. They don't have to be related directly to the product or service, though should have some relevance to what you are designing. For example, a student's goal might be "Graduate within four years."
- Behaviors. These describe actual or potential behaviors or actions the person would have with the particular product or service. They are much more specific than goals. For example, a potential student's behavior related to a financial aid website might be, "Apply for a scholarship."
With these components identified, you can fill in the details and bring the person to life:
- A representative quote. Ideally, this should be a real quote that represents the feelings or context of this audience segment.
- A photo. This is optional and has benefits and drawbacks. A photo is beneficial because it can make the person more relatable and help build empathy, but it may cause assumptions or bias. If you do use a photo, avoid generic stock images.
- Descriptors. These adjectives help bring the person to life and build empathy. Descriptors can include common characteristics such as "motivated," "curious," or "busy."
- Constraints. These describe technical, knowledge, or other constraints that may prevent the person from achieving their goals or behaviors. For example, a new instructor's constraints might be, "Has never taught online before" or, "Experiences imposter syndrome." They tend to reflect broad personal or professional constraints, though if useful they can reflect specific known pain points associated with the product or service, such as "Uses an iPad to access the interface" or "Not familiar with grant terminology."
Pro tips
- Adapt personas for focused projects. Detailed personas are more useful than ones that are overly general.
- Adapt the template to what is most useful for your project and your audience. Other categories that can be helpful include: priorities, frustrations, implications, and top tasks.
- Consider writing a research goal to guide the creation of your persona. Ask: what is important for you to know about your audience?
- Create personas collaboratively with your project team so you have shared ownership.
- Integrate personas into your existing workflows to get the most value. For example, you can incorporate personas into user stories and content planning templates.
- Remember that persona goals and behaviors might vary based on context. You can use the same persona but identify different persona priorities based on web page or task, for example.