How to Develop and Maintain User Personas

By Jenny Fan

At Applico, personas help us refine and design our products with the end user in mind. In coordinating our teams to juggle feature prioritization, design and engineering decisions, and strategic vision, personas ground our teams to one common understanding for better clarity and efficacy. Personas are highly helpful in the beginning of the product development process, and they are ultimately a living document that can be continuously iterated and improved upon, especially after launch as more data points become more available.

What are personas, and how do I use them?

Personas are a commonly used tool throughout all phases of product design. They involve creating imaginary but detailed descriptions of the primary users of a product. They’re broad enough to include shared characteristics within a user type, but specific enough that they can be imagined as a single, real user with a name and identity. Personas should be able to be used across product, engineering, and design teams, and can be used as a decision-making tool to help focus and prioritize elements of a consistent interface.

They are especially helpful as a basis for design discussion, since the entire team comes together to define who the user will be and incorporate a composite of real, specific attributes. By including specific demographic traits for a fictitious person, personas can ground teams to a fleshed out idea and reduce miscommunication.

While marketing teams regularly use marketing segments to understand the aggregate traits of their audience’s various demographic clusters, personas are comprised of composite attributes but only describe an individual user. Because of this, personas are encouraged to include specific names, pictures, demographic traits, occupation types, and behaviors, all of which are meant to help the team picture the key individual who would be using their product. The level of specificity should be broad enough to not excessively limit the benefits of the product to a user base of 1, but specific enough to avoid representing all possible traits of anyone that could possibly use the product. A project may have a number of secondary personas, but try to limit the focus to less than 3-4 primary personas. With any more, your teams may lose focus.

How do I create personas?

Personas are the result of a collaborative discussion between your teams, and they can include data points from app analytics, market research, and user observation. While marketing segmentation most frequently groups user types based on similarities in quantitative metrics, such as pricing and features, personas may arise from observing shared attributes, differentiating qualities, and user behaviors.

In setting up your persona document, you can organize the content to answer these questions:

• Attributes: What are the primary characteristics of this persona?
• Goals: What would your product help them achieve?
• Scenarios of Use: Under what circumstances would the user use your product?
• Background Information: What other information about the user is relevant to your product or helpful for you to know?

Meeting as a team, you can begin by defining some dimensions that may matter for your product for each of these categories and identifying significant differences in these dimensions. From there, your team can create sensible clusters by grouping commonly shared attributes. These assumptions can always be tested in usability testing.

For example, a persona for an airline ticket booking website could look to start with a persona like this:

This persona is “Sally,” a 45-year-old mother working in professional services with the above qualities. For a budget airline, the design of an application targeting this persona would look very different from an application targeting a frequent business traveler, whose persona description could be entirely different. This traveler could be “Ben,” a 57-year-old executive of an import/export business who travels frequently between three major countries for business purposes:

Deciding which personas get priority depends on your business needs and requires internal discussion and alignment with the business direction. For a budget airline, Sally may be identified as the primary user and serve as a north star for feature development, but understanding Ben’s needs can be supplementary when it comes to organizing the content on the site.

As a rule of thumb, your team could create up to 5-10 discrete roles from your research, but be sure to identify the top 1-2 personas that will be your primary users to avoid losing focus. In shipping a product that tries to appease every possible user, you could end up appeasing no one.

Refining personas with data

Strong personas are informed by data points relevant to the user’s activities, interests, and behaviors. They make personas more believable and defensible when priorities or design choices conflict. Data can come from within your organization or from third party research and databases (such as Forrester or Gartner). Conducting field visits, user observation, and market research studies are all useful to collect metrics for usage/behavioral data. For digital products, building in analytics tracking tools like Google Analytics, Adobe SiteCatalyst, and MixPanel can deliver comprehensive tracking for visitor demographics, user behavior, and engagement on a visit and session level. For service products, help desk calls and feedback forms are also a good source of information about common barriers and issues. As your product grows, your personas should be regularly revisited to back up research and continuously replace initial assumptions with data as it becomes available.

Conclusion: Knowing your user

Personas provide the foundation for designing a clear interface that meets the user’s expectations. As project managers and designers must juggle operating constraints or client requirements with a team’s vision for the product, personas can be the main voice in the discussion for the user and his or her needs. While it can be daunting to develop personas at the beginning of a project, it’s perfectly fine to start with well-informed assumptions that are later updated and refined with actual data as your product grows. Testing your persona assumptions can be an important tool in your user experience strategy, alongside A/B and multivariate testing and analytics monitoring.

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Filed under: Product Engineering | Topics: mobile apps, user personas