How to Create a User Persona That Guides Product Decisions

Successful business planning and development start with an accurate and deep study of the target customer by creating a fictional user persona based on your business goals and collected data.

When you create and design user persona examples based on different user types, you will help your employees, managers, and leaders develop an effective product management strategy for your ideal customer.

Today, we will help you understand all about user personas, how to create user personas, and many more important details to boost your user persona creation process.  

What Is a User Persona?

A user persona is a fictional representation of your target customer interested in your product or service based on the gathered data, templates, stories, and insights about your expected customers or users.

Moreover, the typical user personas help businesses understand their customers, leading to better and user-centered decisions with a customizable and designed project guide.

Usually, the user personas include details like age, job, motivations, pain points, and habits about each fictional persona with a complete case study to provide the marketing professionals, designers, and other employees with the needed information.

So, the fictional user persona is a representation of the target user to help teams tailor and develop their messaging, design, and solutions to match the real expectations of their current audience.

How Many User Personas Are Enough?

There are a lot of opinions around this point, however, the best product management courses highlight the 3-5 well-prepared user personas as the perfect study and design of fictional users to analyze, study, and reflect target customers effectively.

In most cases, this number of framed user personas would be enough to capture the key segments of their users and reach analysis goals without overcomplicating the user persona process.

However, when you do your user persona study, make sure to focus on quality, characteristics, and relevance instead of focusing on the quantity of created user personas.

How to Build an Effective User Persona?

If you are ready to create the most efficient user persona for your business, then you need to follow these professional and creative steps in your process:

Analyze Collected Data:

You can start building fictional user personas by doing surveys, interviews, analytics, and asking for customer feedback to collect quality data, then, you could analyze these expected user data to set patterns in behavior, preferences, and challenges for your user personas.

Define Targeted Audience:

Once you finish your data analysis, you should identify your target customer based on your business goals, customer demographics, interests, and usage habits to create the ideal user persona for each product or service.

Outline Audience Segments:

Categorized user persona is more effective, thus, you should group your audience into clear segments based on shared traits or goals, like interest, age, education, location, and so on, to create specific and relatable users and personas for each group.

Set the Main Goals:

Determine what each user persona wants to achieve with your product or service before creating your user personas; in other words, put yourself in the fictional users’ shoes to drive better user decisions and design their journey.

Highlight the Pain Points and Possible Problems in Your User Personas:

Knowing your expected user's pain points will help you relate to them better; therefore, work to identify the frustrations, barriers, or unmet needs your persona faces, then offer meaningful solutions through your product or service.

What Is the Difference between User Persona and Buyer Persona?

Many people who did not attend the professional product management courses in Dubai, may confuse the two concepts of buyer persona and user persona; thus, let us clarify this point for you:

• When you design and create the fictitious user persona, you should think of the person who actually will use what you are offering, focusing on their goals, experiences, characters, behaviors, and challenges during the usage of products and services.
• A buyer persona refers to the actual individual who makes the purchasing decision, which may or may not be the same as the user, so, we can say that the detailed model of buyer personas includes more on purchasing motivations, decision-making factors, and financial influence.

Let us share with you a realistic example to help you engage and apply with these user profiles professionally, so, a parent buying a toy is the buyer persona, while the child playing with it is the user persona.

Eventually,

The user persona is a great idea and process to help you and your team manage your product and service with effective operations and processes based on your target audience.

Moreover, when you create a professional user persona, your target customer will feel more related to your business as all your work will be developed based on the customer's needs and preferences.