Use specific and research-based user personas as a baseline for your design, development, marketing, and sales efforts to improve conversion, user experience, and customer satisfaction. A user persona helps you keep your focus on your target market. Building user personas may require in-depth research, but it’s worth the effort. Plus, our user persona template will help you stay on task and speed up the process.
What Is a User Persona?
A user persona represents a typical member of your audience. Most businesses will have around 2-5 user personas that represent their full target market. Personas are a guide you can use to optimize your product and communication. However, it’s not a substitute for actual customer feedback. On the contrary, since each persona aims to represent an actual segment of your audience, it’s important to base it on research. Don’t forget to talk to your customers and learn about them and their pain points.
How Much Information Should a User Persona Template Contain?
In short, not too much. The content you include should describe the potential user as concisely as possible. While a lot of research may go into understanding your target market, the user persona needs to be straightforward. You want to convey the relevant information, but make it eye-catching and memorable – a snapshot. So that a quick glimpse at each persona will give your team all the info they need.
What Information Should a Persona Template Include?
The information you include can vary based on your type of business (b2b vs b2c), who your audience is, and what you’re using your personas for. However, some content is essential and you should not exclude it. A good user persona needs to contain the following:
Basic Demographic Info & Bio
This section should represent a snippet of who the user is. Include their age, gender, occupation, residence, and marital status. If there is some other demographic information you find relevant, don’t hesitate to add it. Also, give them a short bio. Remember that you are creating an archetype user that represents your ideal customer. Don’t zero in on a minor subset of your customer base.
Personality Type
Including a personality description will help flesh out who they are in the mind of your team. You can do this in multiple ways. First, you can write an actual description of their personality. So, are they funny, friendly, outgoing, workaholics, etc.?
Second, you can make a scale of the relevant personality traits. So, a scale from introverted to extroverted, rural to urban, calm to hot-tempered, and so forth. Finally, you can use actual psychological classifications, if your team will understand them. The Myers-Briggs personality type indicator is a popular classification tool you can use.
User Motivations
This section is extremely important. You need to list what your user personas want and need, but only in relation to your product. Not their life goals and motivations, unless they are somehow related. For instance, if you are designing a dating app, “Get married in the next 5 years” is perfectly valid. Not so if you are designing a fitness app.
The Pain Points
If your user persona templates contain nothing else, they should at least contain the users’ pain points. Pain points are a powerful indicator of what your users need from your product. Ask yourself: what problems do they have? Then: how can my product help? This will guide your product design in the right direction.
User Persona Template Design
Finally, let’s discuss how to present your user personas. After collecting the information you need to build each persona and filling out the template it’s time to think about the presentation. Keep your goal in mind – visualizing your audience, and turning it into a small collection of specific and realistic characters you can relate to in your work. In essence, you can do what you like, as long as it’s memorable and accessible. So, bright colors and some visuals are good options. Plus, include an image of your user. It doesn’t have to be an actual photograph – a sketch can do. This is the place to get creative.
We hope you enjoy building your personas and using them to get close to your target audiences and make them happy. Check out our customer success templates and product templates for more ways to learn about your clientele and communicate with them.
Preview 
