How to create a user persona

We previously discussed why it’s important to create user personas in the process of building your brand and / or design strategy. In a nutshell, the creation of different identities that cover all your potential target audiences, allows you to more thoroughly test and strengthen your design… But how are they created and what should they include?

Step 1. Segment your audience

Your brand research should give light to how many personas you will need to create by broadly giving you the different audiences you either already or would like to speak to. In my previous example of a website that sells hats for dogs, these were: individuals, wholesale resellers (pet shops and groomers) and low scale manufacturers (Etsy-type sellers).

Step 2. Build a basic profile for each segment

From here you can start off easy. For each segment consider a typical answer for that person’s:

• Job title: specifically in terms of level of seniority and their main remit, e.g. commercial, brand
• Company / organisation: pick a real life example
• Age: a range is fine, e.g. 30–39
• Location: ideally down to city level, if not a country is fine

This basic profile is now the representative of your segment, who you can also add a name to if you like. Everyone loves a Geoff so here he is:

• Job title: Owner
• Company: Snip Doggy Dogs grooming parlour
• Age: 35–40
• Location: London, outer suburbs

Step 3. Get into Geoff’s mindset

From here, slip into Geoff’s shoes for a moment and consider his goals and barriers when it comes to his interaction with a product or service like yours.

We recommend creating personas with others in your team to keep you on track and stop the trap of projecting your own thoughts onto Geoff. The more valid points you can list, the fuller the picture you’ll be able to build of why your audience would or wouldn’t want to engage with you, which then become important considerations throughout all parts of your brand building: from positioning, to tone of voice, to packaging, to website — every strand and execution.

So what about Geoff?

Geoff’s goals:

• Attract more / new clients to his grooming parlour, by widening his offering beyond just giving dogs great haircuts
• Increase the average spend of his existing client base by giving them more reason to spend with him
• Create more noise about his shop — as the adland saying goes, “content is king”, and although there’s a lot of interest in Geoff’s before and after posts of shnauzers, perhaps he hasn’t yet considered that shnauzers wearing hats could triple this…

Geoff’s barriers:

• Time. Geoff is a small business owner and single dad to his own 3 pugs. Convenience of the services he uses is a big factor so poor user experience is a big deterrent to him. How will you compete with the ease of one click purchase on Amazon?
• Financial admin. Tracking, recording and accounting for a small business’ finances is arduous, no matter how much the likes of Xero and Sage try and tell you otherwise. How will your e-commerce system provide an easy solution to this for him?
• Risk of outlay. Cash flow is crucial and Geoff will have to pay for his hats prior to seeing the money back from re-selling them, all the while risking that fedoras could be last season by the time they’re in his shop and not sell at all. What reassurance could you bring to him to resolve this?

From the above you get the drift — when fully fleshed out, user personas give you important and practical considerations for your brief, and should be used to test your strategy throughout all decision making to ensure you always have your audience’s needs front of mind.