What are user personas and how to use them for product development?

Overcome biases and ensure your product is user-centric by using detailed personas to align development with actual user goals, motivations, and frustrations for market-fit solutions in this edition.

In many startup companies, the user, their goals, motivations, and frustrations are often overlooked during various stages of product development, allowing personal biases to inadvertently shape the product or service. This oversight can lead teams to prioritize areas misaligned with users' needs, potentially derailing the product's success. Even if the product idea originated from a personal need, confirmation biases can result in neglecting market trends and the competitive landscape.

If you have conducted some market validation, you have likely gathered valuable user insights (if not, you can check our previous article here) and may have adjusted features based on feedback or planned new ones. However, unprocessed data is untapped potential for enhancing features or generating new ideas. User personas bridge the gap between your team’s assumptions and actual customer needs. Let's clarify what user personas are and how they differ from simple customer profiles and demographic information.

Personas vs Profiles vs Segmentation

User Personas

The NN Group?defines a user persona as a?fictional?yet realistic description of a typical or target user?of the product. A persona is an archetype rather than a real individual, yet it should be depicted as if it were an actual person.

Personas represent an individual rather than a group and are built based on user interviews, surveys, and other user research data. They depict the customer, aiming to convey their needs, desires, and frustrations.

Customer Profiles

Customer profiling primarily involves segmentation. These profiles categorize groups of customers based on known facts or data. Profiles are more numerical, encompassing counts, percentages, z-scores, averages, standard deviations, comparisons, and similar metrics.

Segmentation

It refers to the process of dividing a broad market into subgroups of consumers based on shared characteristics. Examples of user segments include power users, inactive users, new users, free trial users, and others.

Including Personas Into Development

Requirement Definition

Personas can help articulate and prioritize user requirements and, therefore, better align project requirements. Make sure that the features you’re building match the needs and goals of the personas.

During The Design Phase

They can also aid in the creation of user-journey maps, story boards and customer journeys to visualize how they interact with the product. These are great guides not only for interface design, usability and accessibility, but also to understand when product adoption happens and where you might be losing customers.

Validation And Testing

With well define personas, you can conduct usability testing to validate solutions with the right users that actually use your product.

Marketing And Support

Targeted marketing strategies work better when you have a solid understanding of whom you’re targeting. Your strategies will resonate more with your users. Likewise, customer support approaches can be tailored based on different needs and user feedback.

Team Alignment

When the entire organization, regardless of how big or small it is, has a unified understanding of whom they’re building the product around, it leads to less wasted time developing different strategies that do not align with the end-user.

Next, let’s see the steps needed to build User Personas.

Building Effective User Personas

Step 1: Assemble a Diverse Team

If you have a team, gather a group of members from different departments (e.g., design, development, marketing) to ensure a variety of perspectives. Involving the team helps gather support for the use of personas and makes the traits and behaviors of each user more credible, as they are based on actual user data.

If you are doing this on your own, it’s good practice to keep in mind that your experiences are not always universally shared, and what might be odd or trivial to you could be a life-changing tool for someone else.

Step 2:Conduct User Research

Use user research tools such as surveys, interviews, and analytics to gather data on your target users. Share this data with the team to show that the personas are grounded in real user behavior and characteristics.

If you’d like to dig deeper into how to start this research, we have an article that touches on different ways of planning and conducting it, you can read here:?Market Validation vs Market Research: How do I define who my target users are?

Step 3: Identify User Characteristics

Examine the collected data to identify key characteristics and behaviors of your users. Cluster these characteristics into groups to start forming clear personas. Look for common patterns and traits.

Step 4: Form Initial Persona Groups

Combine similar groups and eliminate any that seem less important to the business. This helps in creating distinct, useful personas. Once distinct roles emerge, start adding details to make these personas realistic and memorable.

Step 5: Add Persona Details

Basic Information: Include fundamental details such as name, age, gender, and a photo.

Tag Line: Create a tag line that describes what the persona does in real life, avoiding overly witty descriptions to maintain usefulness.

Experience Level: Detail their experience level with your product or service area.

Context of Interaction: Describe how and why they interact with your product, including their preferred devices and frequency of use.

Goals and Concerns: Outline their goals and concerns when using your product, such as the need for speed, accuracy, or thoroughness.

Quotes: Add quotes that sum up the persona’s attitude and perspective.

Step 6: Ensure Relevance and Memorability

Skip unessential details that do not impact design or decision-making processes. For example, a persona’s favorite wine variety is relevant for a wine-related product but not for an unrelated product.

Step 7: Review and Finalize

Review the personas with the team to ensure they are believable and based on the collected data. Make any necessary adjustments to ensure each persona accurately represents a segment of your user base and is memorable.

Step 8: Keep Personas Updated

Periodically revisit and update the personas as new data and insights are gathered to keep them relevant and useful.

Products developed without considering specific user segments can make development costs skyrocket due to frequent revisions based on late-stage user feedback, delaying the product launch and wasting resources on unnecessary features.

Incorporating personas into the development process ensures that the product remains user-centered, relevant, and market-fit. It promotes cost efficiency by clearly defining user needs and priorities.

The Challenge!

User Research Scavenger Hunt

Objective: Gather diverse user insights to inform persona creation.

Activity: Divide your team into small groups or assign each person from your team if it’s a smaller group, the different user research methods (e.g., surveys, interviews, analytics). Each group gathers data and shares their findings with the rest of the team.

Outcome: Comprehensive user insights that will help in creating realistic and detailed personas.

?? ApptimisTip! Give each group or person 10-15 min to present their findings so everyone has a turn while keeping things time-effective.        

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