General Assembly

STUDY GUIDE

CREATING PERSONAS
Personas 101
A fictional, visual representation of your ideal users, containing information such as demographics, the user's needs, goals, and behaviors.

More About Personas

» Developed with carefully gathered and synthesized research conducted with a collection of target users.
» Fictional, generalized representations of ideal customers.
» Go deeper than age, sex, income, education, and location.
» Focus on a specific person (not a group), including information about their behavior, demographics, and goals.

Benefits of Personas
» Prioritizes the person you’re designing for—humanizes the target customer.
» Helps to validate and invalidate assumptions about target users and their needs.
» Guides stakeholders and teams towards a common goal.
» Supports in tailoring the work to meet the needs and goals of your target audience.
» Keeps you focused on your targets needs and wants, not your own opinions and beliefs.
» Gain clarity on your target audience by focusing on the most pressing needs of your most ideal users.

Personas and Data

Personas are built on:

Quantitative Data: Data that can be measured and expressed numerically; collected through surveys and web analytics, and usually includes
age, income, initial purchase amount, and conversion rate.

Qualitative Data: Data about qualities that are not typically expressed numerically; collected through surveys, interviews, and focus groups.
and includes information on user needs, goals and challenges. This information can lend another dimension to your quantitative data.

Data Sources for Personas

» Customer Data
» User Research and Interviews
» Focus Groups
» Market Research and Surveys
» Customer Lifetime Value
» Funnel Metrics
» Online Resources

Building Personas
Start with the basics:
A name and photo bring a persona to life, while a quote drawn from qualitative data helps illustrate why the persona is a good target.
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» Relevant demographic information (age, gender, income, and location) flesh out the persona and help set target parameters.

Define your persona's needs and goals:

» Primary and secondary goals.
» The problem they want to solve.
» How they’re currently addressing the problem.

Identify your persona's challenges:

» Synthesize data to answer these questions.
What problems they face every day.
What pain points your product solves.
How your product or service affects the pain points.

Analyze your persona's behaviors and scenarios:

» List behaviors (and scenarios if available) to provide context for the persona’s needs and challenges.
» Include a description of the complete interaction between a user and a product.
» May describe a location- or device-specific situation in which your persona experiences a problem or a need.

Persona Template
Feel free to use GA's Persona Template as a starting point.