In today’s competitive market of digital products, understanding your users is key to remaining successful and relevant. User personas, detailed profiles of your target users, can help you get a better picture of your users’ needs and wants and generate empathy to build better products.
In this chapter of our big guide on user personas, we are going to dive deeper into the different types of user personas, their benefits and nuances. In other chapters, you’ll find a step-by-step guide to creating a user persona, helpful templates, questions, examples and so much more!
Let’s jump straight in!
Key Takeaways:
➡️ User Personas are representations that encapsulate the goals, needs, and behaviors of a target user group.
❗ While they help teams understand and empathize with users, creating accurate personas requires thorough user research.
✅ Qualitative personas provide a deep insight into user behaviors and motivations through methods like interviews and observations.
🧠 Just relying on demographics can introduce bias and overlook essential user details.
💡 Pairing statistical personas (data-driven) with qualitative ones ensures a balanced and comprehensive understanding of the user base.
What is a user persona?
A user persona is a representation of how your target user looks like, their needs, wants, goals, problems, and other characteristics. It helps teams visualize their ideal customer and better understand the person they’re building a product for.
The main goal of user personas is to put together the research data you have about the target audience of your product, use it to inform design decisions, and create an effective solution to users’ problems.
Creating user personas helps to humanize the data, generate empathy, and give teams a definition of what their future user looks like. This helps to get a better understanding of what kind of product they’re looking for, promoting user-centricity.
User personas can also be described as the generalization of your specific target user group. That’s why most companies you encounter will usually have more than just one user persona. Depending on the product or service you provide, it may be hard to represent all the different user types as one persona. To remain accurate and specific, we recommend you create a different user persona for each of the segments in your user base.
What does a good user persona look like?
Although user persona is a generalization, it can’t be the same for every product. A good user persona is unique, representative, and, most importantly, based on real user research. The elements of your user persona may vary, depending on the type of the product, as well as what you’re looking to understand. However, there are a couple of things you should know before you start building your user persona.
The old way to do that is by creating a fictional character, giving them a name and character traits, and describing their demographics in as much detail as possible. The problem here is that most of that information is not relevant to your product. It often makes the situation even worse by introducing bias and focusing on useless specifics while overlooking the important staff.
While demographics are necessary in some cases, they won’t always help you create a good product. For that, you’ll need to know what’s going on in your users’ minds and how they are thinking. What problems do they deal with? How they are solving them?
To create a helpful user persona that will guide your product decisions you need to focus on finding out your users’ needs, preferences, problems, thoughts, habits, and expectations of your product.
This seems like a lot to know, right? In reality, it’s not that difficult.
You just need to conduct thorough user research and actually get to know your users, instead of judging them by their gender or location.
Here are some of the main questions your user persona needs to answer:
- Who is your user?
- What do they want?
- Why do they want it?
- How do they want to achieve it?
- What stops them from achieving it now? / How are they achieving it now?
By answering these questions you’ll get a better idea of how your users think, and act and what problems your product needs to solve.
What are the types of user personas?
There are 3 main types of user personas out there. The key difference between them is their depth, as well as the amount of research required to put them together.
1. Lightweight
Lightweight user personas are those that don’t go into too much detail. These are just basic high-level overviews of the user. The problem with them is they are either based on some old data the company has about the user, or consist completely of the team’s assumptions.
Lightweight personas don’t require conducting any user research. They often include fundamental demographics, a few goals and challenges, and maybe some behavioral traits.
Although these give at least some information about the user, they will not give you enough to support serious design decisions. Lightweight user personas are suitable for agile teams where you need to create something and iterate as you go. Or they can be the first version of the more detailed user persona, the one you refer to before any additional research is conducted.
2. Qualitative
Qualitative user personas, on the other hand, focus on understanding the behaviors, needs and pain points of the user. That’s why they are based on the data teams gather from user research. To create those, you can conduct interviews, surveys, observations, ethnographic studies, etc.
Qualitative user personas can serve as invaluable tools at the ideation and design stage. They help to empathize with the user, understand the reasons behind their behavior, and tailor the products to fit their needs.
This type of personas helps to paint a comprehensive picture of who your users are and how they need their problems to be solved.
3. Statistical
Statistical user personas are built with the help of quantitative research methods, large datasets and analytics. They use methods like surveys, usage statistics, and other measurable behaviors to create profiles that represent significant segments of the target audience.
With a strong emphasis on statistics, they can be helpful for identifying behavioral patterns and preferences. They can validate or challenge assumptions made during the creation of qualitative personas and are particularly important in large-scale product decisions or marketing strategies.
These personas often segment users based on specific metrics, such as the frequency of product usage or certain behaviors. They are more expensive to create as puting togetehr this kind of statistics and datasets may require complex technologies. However, depending on the goals of your projects, these can be extremely helpful and even crucial.
Why does every business need user personas?
User personas are artifacts that help everyone on the project align in their understanding of who they are creating a product for.
Here are some of the main reasons why user personas are important:
- Empathy and understanding: first things first, user personas help to humanize research data and generate empathy towards your target user. Empathy is key to creating products that people love and need. By understanding users’ needs, motivations, and pain points, businesses can design products, services, and experiences that genuinely resonate. This makes it easy to come up with relevant features and helps team members to put themselves in users’ shoes.
- Guided decision-making: user personas provide a great reference point to ensure user needs and preferences are at the forefront of any design decision. This helps to keep users in mind at all times and always remember who you’re creating a product for.
- User-centricity: adding to the previous point, when you know your user’s unique needs and pain points you’re able to put them at the center of the design decisions and create products that they truly need. This creates a commitment to satisfying their needs and, therefore, enhances the user experience of your future product.
- Alignment across teams: user personas help to effectively communicate research findings to people who were not involved in the process, stakeholders, for example. They are also great for ensuring everyone is on the same page and working towards the same goal. They provide a single source of information about the user that everyone can refer to, when needed.
Buyer vs user persona: What is the difference?
Both buyer personas and user personas are research-based profiles that represent segments of your target audience. However, these terms differ slightly in their purpose and focus. They highlight different stages of customer’s interaction with the product.
Let’s first define the buyer persona. A buyer persona focuses on understanding the decision-making processes that lead to purchase. It describes the journey a person goes through when they first realize the problem, start researching solutions and making purchase decisions. Buyer personas may often include details such as buying motivation, buying concerns, role in the purchase process, preferred channels of information, and stages in the buying cycle.
User persona, on the other hand, focuses more on user interacts with the product post-purchase. The goal here is to understand the behavior of the user, how they are solving their problems with your product, if it’s intuitive and easy-to-use.
The main reason for such distinction, is because the buyer persona is not always the user persona. In other words, the person who is making a purchase decision is not always the one who is going to use the product. This is often the case in big enterprises or B2C businesses, for example.
That’s why even though the two terms may seem extremely similar, it’s important to understand the differences in their usage.
What’s next?
Now that you know the basics of user personas and their differences, it’s time to learn how to create one! Move on to the next chapter of this guide and get a step-by-step process explanation on how to make one.
And while you’re at it, take a look at UXtweak! This is your go-to platform for conducting any type of user research and empathizing with your audience.
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