Before you go further with building your product user personas., maybe you want to understand what they are! Check this short article out and come back to start building yours.

After understanding the concept of user personas, your first step should be to think about the why of creating user personas. Why does this make sense to you, to your company, to the people around you? What is the problem you want to solve when creating personas and what are you aiming to achieve with them?

Then, whatever you do, do it based on qualitative and some quantitative user research and data. My tip is to think of data, to listen to your gut, and to let people buy your personas by making them inspiring and real.

Data: gather all the data possible, talk to users a lot, ask your support and sales colleagues, ask the most experienced people in the company, and ask your customers. 

Use your instinct: when talking to users, customers, and other stakeholders, your instincts will tell you stuff. Listen to them, ask people about it! 

Make them Inspiring: be free, get creative, build amazing personas that are almost as real people. Your personas should inspire and influence your stakeholders, teams, and customers.

How can I gather as much data as possible to get reliable and close to reality personas?

Talking to customers is the strongest source of information. You have to be neutral and be happy when customers talk a lot, even if it’s complaining…wait…especially if it’s complaining. Customers just want to get the most of the product they are using. Complaining is the way they find to express frustrations and pains, which you can use for your personas and to make better products. When we talk about listening to our customers people tend naturally to think we are talking about interviews. We are talking about interviews, but also use other sources to get to know everything about them. Some good examples of these are feedback forms, customer reviews, talking to support people, sales meetings, social media posts, user research, complaints, thank you notes, emails and product forums. Use any type of contact with the customers to ask them about your product! All of this information will help you to create very reliable personas, very close to the real customer, and will help you develop even better products that your customers will love!

What kind of information should I include in my personas?

First of all talk to your customers and users. Prepare a bunch of questions, empathize with them, their job, and their life. Get as much information as you can, understand everything – so if you don’t understand something, ask them about it! After that, get creative, yet make sure that you’re doing it sustainably, that you only use enough information for your final goal, avoid redundant information so that people don’t get distracted from the persona, and make also sure that the information you’re filling it up with can be useful. Some examples of data you can enrich your persona with are the name, age, location, hobbies, likes/dislikes, dreams, pains, education, idols, and skills. You may write a short introduction, as that persona would be talking about him or herself – it makes it more real.

Sooo:

Give them a name, a job, describe their tasks – you may use JTBD for this!

Make them more human by giving them a face, a pet, the car they drive…

Always remember, these are your customers, what do you need to know about them to be able to make them happy with your product?

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