Marketing tends to focus on the customer—the person who pays for your product or service. There’s no denying the significance of the actual buyer, but in product development, you must also prioritize the needs of the end user—the person who ends up using the product.
Often, the customer and end user are the same person. If you sell t-shirts directly to consumers online, most of your customers are probably shopping for themselves. But if you sell t-shirts wholesale, you’re not developing your product for your wholesale clients, but for their customers—the end users. You could have a great relationship with your wholesale client, but if the end users don’t like the fit of your shirts, the wholesaler won’t be your client for long.
You can better tailor your products to end users by creating a user persona. Here’s how to create personas to bridge the gap between customer expectations and user satisfaction.
What is a user persona?
A user persona is a profile of a hypothetical user in your target market, detailing demographic information, goals, and pain points. Create user personas to better understand a specific user segment’s needs, behaviors, goals, and challenges, then use your findings to develop products.
User personas use real customer data to create a composite character who isn’t an actual product user, but very well could be. They’re made by gathering and analyzing data obtained through surveys, interviews, and other market research methods. The data is then synthesized into detailed, fictional profiles.
For example, one of your user personas might describe “Alex,” a 22-year-old tech-savvy computer science student. If you’re selling e-readers to universities, Alex could very well be your end user, and his preferences (warm-tinted backlight for late-night studying and a stylus tool for marking up PDFs) will impact how you design your product.
User persona vs. customer persona
User personas and customer personas (also known as buyer personas) are similar in that they describe hypothetical people in your target audience. However, they serve distinct purposes and focus on different aspects of the target audience (especially when the end user is different from the customer).
- User personas represent the different types of users who might interact with your product. The emphasis is on understanding who they are, what they like, and how they’ll use your product.
- Customer personas represent the people buying your product—who may or may not be the end users. The focus is on understanding their purchasing behavior and decision-making process, i.e. why and when they spend money.
When developing a toy for a child, the buyer is typically the parent, while the user is the child. In this case, their priorities differ—the child wants a toy that’s fun, functional, and relevant to their interests, while the parent likely values safety, durability, and affordability.
Benefits of user personas
A solid user persona yields valuable insights for product development and marketing. Here are the primary benefits:
Create user-centric products
Creating user personas at the start of product development can help guide the process. A user persona describes the user’s goal and pain points, so as you develop new features, you can ask yourself, “Would this feature help my user achieve their goal?”
Personifying your user makes it easier to understand their needs without getting bogged down in customer data.
Tailor marketing language
Based on real data gathered from interviews and surveys, user profiles can guide your marketing strategies, including the language you use.
When marketing a new product, you can refer to your user personas to ensure your language resonates with your target user. For example, for a new fitness app aimed at busy professionals, you might use language like “Get fit on your schedule.”
Proactively address issues
Gaining insight into your users’ traits and preferences can help you anticipate potential problems and tailor your products and communications accordingly. For instance, if your personas are generally young, you might notice a preference for mobile-friendly interfaces and prioritize responsive design in your product development.
Align teams
Creating user personas requires cross-functional collaboration, because a solid persona pulls from customer service, sales, and marketing data. Distributing a handful of key user personas to your various teams ensures everyone has a shared understanding of user needs.
What to include in user personas
A user persona profile should be detailed enough to sound real, but not so detailed that it becomes an unwieldy document your team never reads. It should include three essential elements, which you can easily plug into a user persona template:
Characteristics
A user persona depicts your hypothetical user based on customer data and how you’ve chosen to segment your users. Include demographic information like age, gender, location, and occupation, along with a short, memorable narrative introducing the user.
Goals
Your user persona’s goal is their motivation for using your product—or how they’ll use it to meet their needs. Different users may use the same product for various reasons, so creating multiple personas often is necessary.
For example, some people might use a moisturizing lip balm to relieve mild lip dryness, others for severely chapped lips, and another group for the cosmetic benefit of glossy lips.
Pain points
Pain points are the obstacles your user persona faces that prevent them from achieving their goals. These issues guide the necessary features and product attributes.
If you’re updating an existing product, you might list problems with your current product, gathered from customer support tickets, customer reviews, and social listening. Maybe they love the product but find the packaging inconvenient. If you’re developing a new product, you might list your target user’s frustrations with existing options on the market.
User persona example
How to create a user persona
Here’s how to create accurate user personas:
1. Conduct user research
The first step in developing user personas is to learn more about your users by conducting user research. Surveys effectively gather demographic data like household size or income, but user interviews provide deeper insights into target users’ goals and motivations and the language they use to describe your product and themselves.
Customer service, support, and sales teams are invaluable for user research, since they interface directly with customers and end users. They can share common questions, complaints, and suggestions to help you better understand your users.
Some products require other types of user research. For example, if you’re developing a coyote vest for dogs, it might be tricky to interview your canine end-user. But it’s still important that the dog feels comfortable in your vest—if dogs dislike it, their owners, who prioritize their pets’ well-being, won’t buy your product.
In this case, you might measure different breeds, consult veterinarians about dogs’ range of motion, and watch videos of dogs in various garments and observe their body language. You can also interview pet parents about their dogs’ behavior. You might find that most dogs dislike having things pulled over their heads and design a step-in vest instead.
2. Segment users
Based on your research, divide users into groups with shared characteristics and goals. Look for patterns in product usage to group users effectively; determine if users with specific demographic or psychographic traits use your product similarly. Each distinct group will form a single user persona, helping you decide how many user personas you need.
3. Write your personas
Once you’ve identified a handful of key audiences, create a persona who represents each group. User persona templates can be helpful, especially if you’re creating multiple personas.
Distill your research findings into each persona, highlighting users’ goals and pain points. Give your user a name and an avatar to make them more memorable. Don’t go overboard with the details—your persona should include just enough relevant information to help your teams make informed decisions.
User persona FAQ
Do user personas have to be real people?
No. User personas are fictionalized versions of your users based on data gathered from real-life users. User personas should not be real people, although the best user personas use specific details to feel realistic.
What do user personas typically contain?
A good user persona includes key user characteristics based on your audience segmentation, their goals or motivation, and current pain points. You may also choose to include an avatar, a quote in your persona’s voice, and previous experience with your product category.
What should you avoid including in your user persona?
Do not include any identifying information from real people in your user persona. User personas are fictionalized versions of your target users. That being said, don’t include anything not based on actual user data (except maybe their name and avatar). Your persona’s age, location, occupation, goals, and pain points should all come from real user data.
What is the difference between a user persona and a buyer persona?
User personas describe hypothetical end users, while buyer personas describe hypothetical buyers, customers, or decision-makers. Sometimes these are the same person, but in other cases, such as B2B businesses, gifts, and items for children, the end user is different from the person making the purchase.
