How to Create a User Persona (with Examples)

Having users means you’re doing something right — people are engaging with your product.

Needless to say, it’s important to identify who’s on the other side of the relationship if you plan to keep it that way. Businesses who aren’t in touch with their users are often helpless in understanding how they think and make decisions that affect purchasing power.

At the same time, a business that simply takes a guess at who their audience is or what they want may be completely off base — losing sales and customers as a result.

This is where creating user personas helps businesses better understand and reach their target audience. Of course, this is easier said than done, so we’ve put together this guide to help you craft user personas that actually move the needle.

Continue reading or jump to our infographic to learn how to utilize user personas for segmentation, user experience, and more.

What is a User Persona?

User personas are semi-fictitious representations of your target customers. A user persona is framed from real customer discovery and researching the needs, goals, and observed behavioral patterns of a target audience.

User Colombia Phone Numbers List personas help you get inside the mind of your audience. They allow you to gain valuable insights and make decisions based on your users’ needs.

what are user personas with definition and example image?

Personas are especially helpful for gauging the effectiveness of functional UX design through the eyes of a user.

How Many User Personas Do You Need?

It’s rare that a business only targets one audience. Chances are if you’re building your online presence, you’ll be trying to target a range of audiences. In this case, one user persona isn’t going to cut it — leaving you to decide how many you should actually create.

At first, a couple dozen user personas might seem like a good idea. But you’ll realize that the more you create, the more they begin to resemble one another.

We suggest creating no more than four user personas.

Most brands have audiences with characteristics that fall under a subset of primary personas. Having any more just makes user personas unnecessarily complicated and can lead to a lack of focus and a jumbled creation process. Because the goal of user personas is to gain insight into the bulk of your audience, four is more than enough.

As an example, let’s consider four basic personas of an app that allows users to schedule junk removal:

Bill Brooks: Bill is a general contractor who consistently has a need for junk removal. Urgency is important for Bill because he needs junk removed to complete his work.

Chad McFadden: Chad is a college student who moves once every 12 months as some roommates move back home and he finds a new apartment. Chad needs a mattress and couch removed before the landlord will return his deposit. Price is the biggest factor for Chad.

Pam Miller: Pam is a homeowner and rarely needs junk removal but when she does, she needs full service removal, as her disability will not allow her to move the junk into an easily accessible location.

Ronnie Creager: Ronnie lives in a cabin inaccessible by traditional waste management trucks, but needs his waste removed on a monthly basis. For Ronnie, the ability to schedule a monthly pickup is important and with a similar amount of waste for removal each month, he likes having a predictable pricing model.

User Personas and Segmentation

Using behavioral and psychographic data, a business can reflect on who their users are, what they need, and what may stop them from getting it.

Psychographic segmentation capitalizes on specific characteristics and psychological qualities that make a user unique. By dividing customers based on psychological factors like behaviors, personalities, lifestyles, values, and social status, businesses can then analyze the data to predict how a user will respond to targeted marketing campaigns.

As a result, behavioral and psychographic segmentation are incredibly valuable in not only understanding your users, but also compiling the correct data to build user personas. This can help your team take their mobile app marketing strategy to the next level.

How User Personas Benefit Business

User personas are extremely useful to grow and improve a business. They help uncover the different ways people search for, buy, and use products, so you can focus your efforts on improving the experience for real people through real data.

User personas benefit a business in several ways:

User persona benefits for businesses to profile their current and prospective customers

Create consistency across the business: User personas offer a company-wide understanding of your users, putting everyone on the same page. Across the board, personas create a consistent and specific understanding of each target group of customers within your company.

Signal user behavior: By gaining insight into the backgrounds of user personas, you’ll have a better understanding of where your real users spen