User Persona: a Simple Way to Be Sure Who Your Target Audience Is

If you want to put a new product on the market, for a start you need to understand your target audience. Therefore, you will know how to address their problems with your product. And the best tool to learn about your future customer is User Persona.

User Persona is a snapshot of your potential customer imitating a real person. It is not based on presumptions and guesswork but interviews and research conducted among real people from your target audience. To clarify, it combines trends you notice among your audience to create common features.

These are the information a User Persona should include:

• fictional name,
• a casual picture with characteristics,
• demographics and personal background (age, gender, education, family status, ethnicity),
• position and professional background,
• physical and social environment,
• technological environment, device and internet usage, level of technical knowledge,
• everyday activities,
• interests,
• goals and needs,
• motivations,
• frustrations and problems,
• challenges,
• tasks to complete with your product (mobile app, web application, website, etc.),
• useful quotes (words they could really say).

As you can see, these qualities are pretty detailed. Therefore, you can imagine your future customer as a real person and build empathy. That is why features like a fictional name or a photo are so important. They stimulate the imagination and build connections.

]User Persona helps you to identify your audience before you start designing and developing your product. It doesn’t matter if your product is a mobile app, web application or responsive website. Before you begin to design and develop it, you need to check if there’s an audience for it. After that, you need to find out what are this audience’s real problems your product can solve. Meanwhile, you learn about your ideal customers’ needs, pain points, and the issues they face. And these are not assumptions. Certainly, User Persona is based on profound research, so it’s the knowledge you can rely on.

Knowing your future customers profoundly is crucial to developing a successful product. Therefore, the product will be useful and desirable for your prospective users. User Persona concept also helps your design and development team. As a consequence, designers can adopt the perspective of a user creating your app. It also allows you to avoid miscommunications among the development team and you. Above all, User Persona makes you sure that throughout the whole process, team members tailor your appto your target audience needs, and it is much more likely to succeed. It helps to strategize, make better decisions, focus on the same target. To sum up, Persona is something that guides all your choices.

To create your User Persona, in the beginning, you need to conduct profound research. Above all, your Persona must be reliable. Use questionnaires, reach out to real people, talk to them, ask questions. On that basis, build a set of high-quality data.

After that, organize this data into groups. Each group should equal one type of Persona. For example, one group will be single moms and other – big families. It all depends on your product. Subsequently, assign qualities to each group by creating Personas. Analyze and include all the information mentioned in the first paragraph of this article. Don’t forget to pick a photo and to give a name to each one of your User Personas.

Below we present an example of a ready User Persona. This is how you can prepare yours. You can also try using these tools from UXPressia and Hubspot to make the process a lot easier. 

Source: Career Foundry

Need any help with creating your User Persona and getting to know your future product’s target audience? At Appstronauts, we can organize a special workshop for you while we will work on that topic together. Just send us a message at hello@appstronauts.co.