Perfect Personas
Personas are a great way to get an idea of your customers/audience. Creating personas will help you in understanding your user’s needs, experiences, behaviours and goals, therefore, they are very useful to use when creating objectives as you can see where your service is lacking.
In order to create a good persona, there needs to be research behind it. For example, if you were to add hobbies and interests to your personas, you would need to research what these may be instead of just guessing/making up. There are multiple websites such as YouGov.com that you can use to find this information.
Your personas will only be as good as the quality of research behind them, the most effective personas:
- Represent the majority of your users
- Focus on the major needs and expectations of the most important user groups
- Give a clear picture of the user’s expectations
- Describe real people with backgrounds, goals, and values
Benefits of Personas
- Develop an understanding of who your users are
- A deeper understanding of customer behaviour and needs
- Clearer and better decision making – focussed on user needs and goals
- Greater empathy with the uses
Tools to create Personas on
Below is a list of a few platforms that you can use to create your personas, they come with a range of templates and advice. These are all free to use, however, if none of these work for you, you can create your own template in Microsoft Word, Powerpoint or any other software you like.
- Xtensio – this is the software I use to create my personas on, they have great templates and is so easy to use, it also looks very professional.
- Makemypersona.com
- Up Close & Persona
- Userforge
- Personapp
This is an example of a persona created on Xtensio:
This is an example of a perfect persona as it includes great depth about the user’s personality, her motivations, frustrations, examples of both brands and technology she uses and, arguably most important, her goals.
