Personas help us answer the question - Who are we designing for?

People use products and services. If we don't know about the people who are using our products, we run the risk of designing things that they don't value. But if we really take the time to get to know our users, we can create personas to represent them. The product team can now use these personas to keep their real users or target users in mind. Thus we have a user-centered design process that utilized the power of empathy for our customers.

A few tips for creating personas

1. Work with your Marketing team (If your company has one)

See if they have market research your target customer(s)
This is great place to start when choosing what types of people to recruit as participants in your persona development research

2. Create a prototype persona

Create a persona that is all your hypothesis about what this person is like
But don't use it yet. These are all educated guesses at this point

3. Create a prototype persona

Create a persona that is all your hypothesis about what this person is like
But don't use it yet. These are all educated guesses at this point

4. Base your persona on research

Ask open-ended question to participants so they can tell your stories about their past experiences
Exploratory UX research can be a good start
Usability test your current product if you have one
Talk to 7 - 10 participants to make your first persona

5. If 3 or more participants have the same behavior, challenge, goal, need, thought, pain points and mental model, those become research insights that you write into your persona

6. Your persona should include the following sections:

Name, demographics, income, career information, marital status
A behaviors section
A goals section
A challenges section