Creating user personas is a great start to get into design thinking.
When you think about evolving your product you always want to have your consumers front and center. Optimizing a persona is a key exercise.
And when I say evolving, I mean it.
3 points to keep in mind
1. You don’t create a persona one and done. It will evolve as you learn more about your customers.
2. Creating a persona is no substitute for conversations with actual customers.
3. Always confirm pain points and frustrations are real. These are assumptions that need to get confirmed. Or else it will be misguiding for your designers and yourself. Find actual, real people that reflect these.
Areas to focus on
About
Assign the right demographics to your persona.
These attributes should align with your core audience that you are planning to define for... duh.
Also, an image! It helps a lot. You’ll find what you need for free. Unsplash has a great collection of pictures that get you started when creating a user persona.
Bio
I always write out a bio because I enjoy it. What is the background of your persona? What is your persona doing? What are their motivations and beliefs? What do they enjoy? It’s really fun to make this up. And even more so when you are finding real users that could fit / or not.
Goals, Wants & Needs
Goals and Motivations - these need to be linked to your product. They probably also want scrambled eggs for breakfast on a Saturday morning. But if you are building a finance app that doesn’t really relate. Focus on where your product can help them achieve their goals.
Pain Points
Careful, this is a very important section. Your designers will read this in detail. It guides designs, it guides implementation. I mentioned above, this is the most important Persona section. It needs to be bulletproof and reflect at least a subset of your target audience. Getting this in detail will also inspire you and your team when brainstorming.
A beautiful template for creating user personas
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