Essentials of UI Design XXXXVII: Creating Effective User Personas

Creating persona is an iterative process that depends on collecting continuous insights from user data. The challenge is to do enough to build a product that’s accessible, intuitive, and useful to a sizable demographic. This guide will help you build a clear picture of real users, based on accurate insights on their behavior, goals, and pain points. Besides providing user flows and screens from real apps, UILand will now guide you through developing a design process where every decision comes from answering two questions: who it’s for and why it matters.

Building User Personas

The first step in creating personas is to begin as follows:

Review existing audience data or UX research

If necessary, conduct new studies using new participants

Select the team to build or review personas

Here are steps you need to build effective, research-based user personas.

Define your persona goals.

You need clear goals for the purpose of the personas. This informs the research plan comprising:

The behavior patterns, pain points, and user goals

Preferable data gathering methods such as surveys, user interviews, and usability testing

Participants in the research and creation process

Timeline and UX workflow

Overall, your research plan needs to include current and potential users.

Create questions to help map your personas

This activity helps you know your users by asking questions that explore their behaviors, motivations, and pain points. This reveals trends you can build upon.

Three things your questions should consider include who your (potential) users are, their goal, and whatever’s stopping them from reaching that goal.

Send your questions to participants

When sending out user research questions, all participants must receive the same set. This helps to prevent bias and keeps user data reliable.

Segment your data and map your personas

This step is where you sort the responses to spot recurring themes. You can use quantitative clustering techniques like factor analysis, K-means clustering, and latent class analysis, for large data sets.

Know the number of personas you need

After mapping out user segments, it’s time to review for gaps. Notice patterns that don’t match the identified segments. These edge case user groups are small but important, especially if they influence design decisions, business outcomes, or customer experience.

Create a suitable persona template

A good template highlights the user’s goals, blockers, context, and motivations.

Build your personas

Now create each user persona to align with your target audience. Focus on what’s common to your personas, including shared user needs, workflows, and behaviors.

Prioritize your personas

Choose personas that are most obvious from your data. Also consider those with urgent user needs and clear points for improvement.

Name and distribute your personas

Use clear and memorable names, while avoiding naming that may lead to unconscious bias.

Creating personas is a high-stakes activity that can reveal important design decisions that will draw users to your product. Check out UILand to see how different user flows derive from carefully built user personas.