Why you need to make user personas to reach out the right customers?

What are personas and why are they important?

A persona is a tool that helps you describe your target customer. Personas are precise definitions of our users and what they want to achieve. Personas are not real people, but they are hypothetical archetypes of actual users.

Personas are a way for UX designers and product teams that use user-centered design to understand their target customers better. Personas are mainly used during the design phase, but you can use them earlier on in your product development process to help you come up with hypotheses about your target customer.

Personas help ensure that everyone in your company who is working on the product understands who the customer is. This is important because, if you don’t write it down, share it, and talk about it, different people in your company might have different ideas about who the customer is.

Personas help people on the product team make decisions about what features are important and how to design the user experience. A good persona gives everyone on the team the same information and reasoning to work from. This helps when making product decisions as a group.

People who are working on different parts of a project should make sure that their work is compatible and helps achieve the goal of the project, rather than making it more difficult to achieve.

What Info Should a Persona Provide?

Good personas represent your target customer. They should have relevant demographic, psychographic, behavioral, and needs-based attributes. Personas should be easy to understand and fit on a single page. They usually include the following information:

• Name – What’s their name?
• Representative photograph – What do they look like?
• A quote that conveys what they most care about
• Job title
• Demographics
• Their needs/goals
• Relevant motivations and attitudes
• Related tasks and behaviors
• Frustrations/pain points with the current solution
• Level of expertise/knowledge (in the relevant domain, e.g., how savvy are they in using a computer or mobile phone)
• Product usage context/environment (e.g., use mobile on a commute, laptop in a coffee shop)
• Category of user e.g early adopter, late adopter, etc (for your product category)
• Any other important attributes

There are two things that can help you learn more about a person. The photograph of the person and the quote that states what is important to them.

Your team members will usually remember the name, the photograph, and the quote the most, especially when they are too busy and not looking at the persona.

You can go to the link here if you want to create a persona. To find more examples of user personas, do an image search for “persona examples” and you’ll get great examples to inspire you to come up with your own design.

What is the process of creating personas?

How can you learn about your customers? You can talk to them in interviews and surveys. Interviewing customers one-on-one is the best way to learn about them. Surveys can help you collect data from many customers at once.

When you use survey data, it is important that you do not use the average of the data. You want your persona to represent a real person. You should not design your product for some nonexistent “average” customer.

You can use the aggregate survey data to help ensure your persona represents a good portion of your customer base. Reading through the individual survey responses from people who match your target customer profile can be helpful.

If you want to sell a new product or expand to a new market, you won’t have customers who are already interested in what you’re selling. You can make guesses about who your target customer is, and then test those guesses by talking to potential customers.

Before you design or make anything, you should talk to people who might want to buy it. You need to learn about their needs, how they use things like this now, and what problems they have. That will help you figure out what new thing to make.

These are interviews where you learn about your customers. In user-centered design, they are often called “contextual inquiry” or “ethnographic research.”

Always use an iterative approach when you are talking to customers. As you talk to more people, you will learn more about them and what they want. You can then revise your persona to make it more accurate and realistic.

You want to find a customer who needs and wants what you have to offer.

Potential Problems with Personas

Many product teams use personas to help them succeed.

However, some people do not like using personas. They usually haven’t seen good personas that were used in a strong user-centered design process.

Just like any other tool, personas can be misused. Weak personas might not have all the key information, might be poorly written, or might be based on speculation instead of real customer data.

A persona should be practical and provide useful information that can help inform product and ux design decisions. It is important to avoid including too many superfluous details that don’t add value.

Trying to develop a perfect persona should not slow down your product process. You should not spend too much time on it.

Instead, you should see it as a first draft that you will revise as you learn more about your customers. A good and accurate persona is the result of numerous rounds of customer discovery. You will improve the accuracy of your persona over time as you learn more.

If a persona is well written, the rest of the product team should refer to it as they make decisions about design. They should also use it to evaluate proposed designs.

If your team members are not using personas, you should provide some education on how to use them. Personas can help the team understand their customers better and figure out what they need.

I have seen companies develop a set of personas and then stop talking to customers. This can be a big mistake because the company loses touch with its customers, especially as new product team members join. Personas are a great tool, but they should not replace talking to customers on an ongoing basis.

It’s a good idea to talk to customers early on in the process. But once you have a product or prototype ready, you can get a better idea of your target customer by putting your product out there and seeing which type of customer actually buys it.

You may find that you are attracting more than one type of customer. If this is the case, you should create a new persona for each type of customer.

Some of your customers like your product more than others. These people probably use it more and recommend it to others. Talking to these passionate customers can help you learn more about your target market and what needs your product meets for them that aren’t being met by other products.