What are user personas and why are they important?

Design considers how something works, not just how it looks, and good design considers this not just through your own eyes, but through those of your end user. That’s where user personas come in.

At its most simple definition: A user persona is a made-up person that represents one of your target audience groups, through which you can test the strength of your design.

This definition raises two important points:

1. One of, because what you’re designing may need to appeal to more than one target audience group, therefore you will need to create and test multiple personas.
2. Target, because if you’re redesigning an existing brand, service or product, it’s important to consider who you want to use it, not just who currently is.

So here’s an example… a website that sells hats for dogs. You may know from your existing site analytics that your core audience is affluent, female dog owners, who live in the home counties and make single purchases 2–3 times per year. This data creates your first, very robust user persona.

But who else? Perhaps you would like to boost more wholesale activity; targeting owners of pet shops or dog grooming parlours with retail sections. For this user, the ability to bulk or repeat buy with discounts is of more interest, and perhaps a different account / CRM system would be worth contemplating in the back end of your site to manage this.

Lastly, perhaps you think your offering of only 5 styles of dog hats is not going to be enough to keep the attention of your audience for very long, so you also want your website to attract Etsy makers of the cutest dog hats in the land, so you can re-sell these as feature products. How might your website then need to be designed to clearly attract these people, allow them to contact you, and have space to advertise them as the hat of the month?

Ignoring the nonsense of dog hats for one moment, the above example begins to show how user personas are important to the very foundations of a design, and should play into your strategy in the early stages of any project.