Find out what a user persona is and how it can help you get a trustworthy and realistic picture of how customers can engage with your products and services.
To strategically develop a product or service adapted to the real requirements of users, you must have a design focused on it and the path to understand their needs and desires is traced by creating a user persona.
Long before product or service development begins, the product team must have a clear understanding of the characteristics and needs of various user groups.
In this article we will define this concept in detail and we will give you the key tips to implement this technique in your organization. Continue reading!
What is a user persona?
A user persona is a fictional character based on your current or ideal customer, which is created based on research to identify the different types of customers that could use your service, product, site or brand in a similar way.
This technique can be implemented by interviewing users to understand their needs, experiences, behaviors, and goals. In this way, it is possible to carry out demographic segmentation and psychographic segmentation that allows you to improve the marketing strategies of your product.
A user persona can help you recognize the expectations and needs of the customer for whom you are developing a product or service. This allows you to run an efficient process and achieve the goal of offering an optimal user experience.
Types of user persona
The user persona provides a point of reference throughout a development cycle, enabling organizations to ensure that progress aligns with user needs. Next, we have for you the different types of user persona.
- Goal-Oriented People: A goal-driven person focuses on the methodology or approach a user takes to solve a problem. The purpose is to know how you would use your product or service when establishing the processes and workflows. Therefore, this user persona is associated with user experience (UX) and product development.
- Role-based personas: A role-based user persona understands where a user is in an organization and how this affects their behavior and decision-making. This user persona aims to broaden the view from a goal-directed perspective to one that looks at how the role and environment of a job will affect the demands for a product or service.
- Engaged people: Engaged people offer a comprehensive perspective that gives designers as much information as possible to interact with. This person is developed with characteristics that range from emotions and social background, to their psychology. This strategy improves design processes by helping teams to genuinely envision a person and therefore deliver a better product.
Benefits of creating a user persona
Among the main benefits of creating a user persona for your organization are the following:
- Data collection and information analysis enables optimization of a company’s product development process, sales strategies, and marketing campaigns.
- The role of a user persona is to ensure that company initiatives (such as marketing or product development) are carried out with the user in mind.
- It enables organizations to understand which features or products are unnecessary. Efforts are focused on what a user person would find useful or practical to have. In addition, it helps to find out if the target audience will use the product in the expected or desired way.
- A user persona allows you to properly execute marketing strategies, since it offers a reference from the way you interact with customers, communication channels and advertising.
- With a user persona it is possible to create better business initiatives. That is, find the best strategies to reach the potential customer, whether through calls, emails or meetings.
Steps to create a user persona
Next, we have for you the steps to create a user persona for your brand effectively:
1. Research users
It may seem very obvious, but many times companies choose to skip this step. However, to create a user persona you must base yourself on solid market research that allows you to establish aspects such as demographics, so that your team can adapt to it and design a specific product.
Generally, user research is done through online surveys to reach large numbers of people and collect information in real time.
2. Analyze the collected data
The next step in creating a user persona is to perform a data analysis of the responses collected in your online surveys.
Once you have their data, try to identify similarities between different answers. An effective way to achieve this is through a diagram or affinity map that will give you the necessary information to start building the different segments of your user persona.
Find out how to correctly manage the insights obtained here: UX Research Repository
3. Create draft profiles
The next step is to use the groupings and patterns that you found in your data to create some drafts of people.
This draft of the client’s profile must be composed of the following elements that we present below:
- Profile: Basic data of the person (name, age, gender, occupation, etc.)
- Personality: Information on your behavior
- Referents: Define which people, products and brands influence your purchase decision.
- Phrases: It consists of creating a phrase that that person would use to refer to a product or service.
- Technology experience: It allows understanding how familiar the user is with the use of technological tools.
- Objective: What problem does this person want to solve when purchasing your products or services.
- Devices and platforms: It allows you to identify which devices you constantly interact with.
- Applications: It helps to understand the habits and interaction that the user has with the virtual world.
- Expectations and frustrations: It allows to design specific scenarios taking into account the personality, objective and experience of the user.
- Relationship with the product or brand: It helps to understand the relationship that the user has with your company and the value they obtain from it.
- Importance of creating a user persona in your organization
- Organizations need a user person to help guide any idea development process.
This technique allows them to understand how a user behaves, what they experience, and what their goals are. In addition, it allows the team to empathize with the end user and direct its efforts to them.
By understanding that there are different people, a company understands the different needs and expectations of customers and finds the best strategies to satisfy them.
Additionally, the user persona is the starting point for creating the customer journey map. This will help you understand that, for each archetype that you have created, the interaction through the points of contact with your organization and the motivations it has for doing so can be totally different.
Now that you know what a user persona is, it’s time to identify it. Conduct effective online surveys and start targeting your products and services to the ideal customer. Contact us! We will help you to achieve it.
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