Building User Personas off your User Interviews

Building User Personas from User Interviews

If you’ve ever worked with a UX Designer or dabbled in design yourself, you may have heard of User Personas.

User Personas are fake user profiles that summarize your target users’ characteristics and behaviors. You give them a real name and photo, and pretend that you’re creating your product just for them.

An example of a User Persona. (Source: <a href=”http://www.keepitusable.com/” target=”blank”>http://www.keepitusable.com/)_

How to build User Personas from interviews

You likely won’t be the one making a User Persona. That’s a job for your UX Designer.

But it’s important to understand how they’re made. User Personas are based on certain groups of users that behave in similar ways.

These people don’t actually exist, but they give you more empathy for your user. It’s much easier to create a product for “Lisa” than for some data points in your analytics software.

Personas also make it easier for your team to talk about your target customer. They give you a reference point for all of your decisions.

To make one, interview a large number of users and find their common behaviors. Give the person a real name and a description, and write down some background info that gives you a more clearer picture of who they are.

This should all be based on the results you’ve gotten from user interviews.

If done correctly, the User Persona will help you to create products that accurately address and solve user’s problems. They’ll feel like the product was made for them!

You can dive deeper into User Personas on this tutorial from the UX List: User Research and User Personas