User Persona Definition
Understanding your principal user is one of the first steps to creating a successful business. Whether you’re starting a new venture or mapping an existing experience, using a user persona template is a critical part of creating an accurate picture of your target market.
People in many different fields use user personas to target their audience. In customer experience, marketing, or product design, you will always function with a target audience in mind. Whether you’re targeting a new customer group or are looking to learn more about an existing market, you will always be designing a solution with a specific user in mind; this model is a user persona.
A user persona template is a fictional portfolio that represents your principal user. This template includes realistic attributes, attitudes, and feedback you have received from your customers to create a precise image of who they are and what they need.
Fresco’s user persona allows you to identify the reasons people use your product/service and how you can improve their experience.
Creating a user persona template involves taking a deep dive into the experience of your customers and uncovering their assumptions, needs, goals, and pain points. By mapping out these variables, you can introduce a holistic picture of your user into your journey mapping process.
Not only can creating a user persona make customer journey mapping more accurate, but it is the best way to create empathy for your users. Creating empathy with your principal user is the most important factor in understanding their journey and creating solutions that target their pain points. The entire point of persona mapping is to locate the bottlenecks in a customer’s journey and create user-friendly solutions that enhance their experience. Creating empathy is at the heart of that process.
User Persona Template
Creating a user persona template is one of the most important aspects of effectively targeting your principal user, and it begins by breaking down their demographic. Here is a walkthrough of how to create a user persona template.
Identity & Demographic
Questions to ask: Who is your user persona? What’s their name, age, location, and occupation? What about their identity makes them well suited for your business?
In order to build empathy for your principal user, you need to create a sample identity. This will include their name, age, occupation, and general demographics. Along with persona details, expand on what they use the tool for and why it’s helpful for their role.
Persona Image
Questions to ask: What does your user persona look like?
Add an image to your example persona to give them even more depth. Putting a face to your sample persona adds a visualization element to your template, which helps increase empathy for your target market.
Goals
Questions to ask: Why do they use the product? What do they seek to accomplish? What do they aspire to achieve?
The goals section focuses on the tasks that your persona seeks to accomplish and what motivates them to use your product/service. Think about the goals they have in their life, either professional or personal, and how your product/service can help them achieve those goals.
Daily Tasks
Questions to ask: What important tasks do they accomplish each day? How do these tasks incorporate or require your product/service?
The daily tasks section is where you will detail the tasks that the user accomplishes in their day-to-day life. Think about how these tasks inform their use of your product/service and what the most important things they do are. Additionally, consider how their daily tasks build towards their goals and if there is a connection between the two.
Needs & Feedback
Questions to ask: What do they need from your product? Why are their needs important? What feedback have you received from them, both positive and negative?
The first part of this section focuses on the customer’s needs for your product/service. This will discuss why they use it and what value it brings to their everyday life. Think both about why they need it generally and the specific features that make the product valuable to them.
Secondly, this group allows you to map the customer feedback you’ve received from real users. This feedback is important and will expose some of the real needs and frustrations people have with your product.
Pain Points
Questions to ask: What do they not like? What do they want to change? What harms their experience?
The final section focuses on people’s pain points with the product. This is where customer feedback will be critical, and the contributions here should reflect real concerns rather than what you assume the problem to be.
User Persona Template Use Cases
User persona templates can be applied to a ton of different scenarios. Because they’re so widely applicable, we thought we’d break down some of the most common use cases.
Customer Experience
Optimizing customer experience depends on your understanding of your target user. Creating a user persona is the perfect way to explore multiple ideal customers and how their experience can be catered to through your product. By deeply understanding your target users’ needs, you can create an experience that meets all their goals and expectations.
Product Insights
Using a user persona template helps product managers understand what features, use cases, and goals their principal user prioritizes. This insight is extremely valuable for planning priorities in the future and will help improve the product for every customer segment.
Marketing Outreach
Understanding how to effectively reach your target market is another important use case of a user persona and is a channel that marketing teams use consistently. Analyzing a target market and understanding how to reach them effectively is a key outcome of creating a user persona template.
Journey Mapping
All of these use cases allow teams to more accurately journey map and understand how their users experience their product journey. This provides value and insight across all touchpoints throughout the business and is an overarching use case for creating a user persona template.
Benefits of a User Persona Template
Among the many use cases of a user persona template, there are some common benefits that teams may see from implementing it. Here are some of the biggest advantages to integrating user personas into your collaboration.
Create Empathy
When you can successfully identify with the person you’re designing for, you can better tailor the final product to their needs. Creating empathy is one of the most important parts of creating a successful outcome, and a user persona helps create empathy with the customer’s perspective. Creating multiple personas can help provide a holistic view of the customer’s experience and their biggest needs, frustrations, and expectations.
Improve Decision Making
By creating empathy and creating a user persona template, you can make well-informed decisions about your product/service. Increasing the understanding of your customer’s needs is key to addressing their concerns, and doing so helps improve your team’s decision-making ability.
Identify Roadblocks
When you gain a broader picture of your users, you can more accurately identify the risk in your experience. By creating a user persona and diagramming their needs and pain points, you can more accurately identify roadblocks in their experience and develop channels of success rather than be surprised by future risks.
Create a User-Centric Experience
When creating a user persona, you can easily track what needs are being met and where there is still a gap in the user’s experience. Because of this, you can focus on creating a user-centric experience in the future to meet their needs successfully. Regularly referencing your persona map helps remind everyone who the end user is, what they need, and why we should empathize with their experience. Doing so helps create a driven and targeted vision of the end product you’re creating.
User Persona Example
In the above example, we look at an example user persona for the Apple Watch. By starting with the persona details, you can begin painting a picture of what the specific customer segment looks like. Proceeding through the sections, you gain an understanding of why they want an apple watch and what their daily life looks like. Because the apple watch is a fitness/personal product, the daily tasks primarily reflect the active stages of the user’s personal and professional day.
After formalizing the goals and tasks of the persona, you move to understand their general needs and pain points. These are important to note because they will inform the team of what the user needs from the product/service and how it can improve. By focusing on these details, you can plan for the future to optimize success in this customer segment.
