Persona

Published Jun 13, 2022Updated Oct 11, 2023

Personas are fictional archetypes of the target users of a product or design, created as composites of user research or market research. Businesses create personas in order to build empathy for users and foster a shared understanding of the types of people who use a product.

Benefits of Personas

Tools like personas, user journey maps, and storyboards are used by researchers to advocate for the user, tell stories, and circulate key points from user research across an organization. Using a range of multiple personas offers an opportunity to share research on both “typical” users of a product and fringe or outlier users in a concise, memorable way.

Defining Personas

Personas may include details on product usage as well as other details to humanize the user and paint a more complete picture, and can be adapted depending on what feels relevant to a particular product or research initiative.

Persona details might include:

Name
Age
Gender
Location
Bio
Illustration or photograph
Occupation and/or education
Experience level with products in your field
Location where they use your product
Number or type of products owned
Illustrative quotes (can be adapted from user interviews)
Typical schedule
Long-term goals or motivations
Frustrations or pain points
Favorite brands, media, or tools

High-Fidelity and Low-Fidelity Personas

Similar to high-fidelity and low-fidelity prototypes, researchers might create high-fidelity or low-fidelity personas, where fidelity can signal the rigor of the research behind the persona. For example, a persona with a simple sketch instead of a photograph signals lower fidelity, while a persona with a photograph and richer text detail signals higher fidelity.

Illustrations of three tools used by user researchers to communicate their research findings: personas, storyboards, and journey maps.