How to create a user persona in 3 steps (with a free template)

Your users and customers have different needs and are drawn to different things. Even though they’re buying or using the same product. 

That’s where user personas come in—to help you make sense of what people are expecting to get out of your business and learn how you can deliver that to them.

What is a user persona?

A user persona is a semi-fictional character that portrays a group of users within your user base. Creating a persona profile involves observing, talking to, and segmenting users by various demographic data (such as age and location) and psychographic data (such as values and beliefs).

Why should you create user personas?

Creating data-driven user personas allows you to empathize with your target audience(s) so you can better understand the diverse wants and needs of the real people who use your website or product. Personas help uncover different use cases for how people browse, buy, and use products—valuable insights you can harness to improve the user experience (UX) and integrate into a customer-centric marketing strategy, product development, or UX design process.

What should a user persona consist of?

User personas come in various shapes and sizes, but there are 3 main things you need to identify to start building a compelling profile:

• A key demographic

• A key goal

• A key concern or barrier

From there, you’ll develop a ‘persona’ that embodies these traits, almost as if you were fleshing out a fictional character for a book or screenplay.

Here’s an example:

A user persona example representing ‘busy professionals’ who use Swiggy, an online food ordering and delivery platform (via Crayon'd)

You can get as creative as you like designing a polished, lifelike persona profile, but you can accomplish the same thing without getting super fancy. 

Let’s go through the basics of researching and building a streamlined user persona for your business.

How to create a user persona in 3 steps

By the end of this basic workflow, you’ll be able to create a streamlined user persona profile that looks something like this:

A simple, no-frills user persona example

All you have to do is follow 3 simple steps—you won’t even need to leave your desk.

Step 1: learn all you can about your users 

The key to building compelling user personas is getting to know your real users first. There are different research methods at your disposal to help you collect relevant qualitative and quantitative data that gets to the heart of user needs.

Whichever research methods you end up using, focus on answering the following questions about your users:

• Who are they?

• What are their main goals?

• What are their main barriers to achieving this goal?

Here are 3 methods you can apply to gather this information:

Survey your users

Place an on-site survey on your most visited pages to collect your users’ demographic information and find out what they say about themselves in their own words.

Your first survey doesn’t have to be perfect; it just needs to get you closer to understanding your customers by asking them a few open-ended survey questions like these:

• Describe yourself in one sentence, e.g. “I am a 30-year-old marketer based in Dublin who enjoys writing articles about user personas.”

• What is your main goal for using this website/product?

• What, if anything, is preventing you from achieving that goal?

💡 Pro tip: use Contentsquare’s Surveys to design and launch your survey in minutes. Choose from over 40+ templates or let the AI assistant generate survey questions based on your persona goal. Then, let AI analyze the results to quickly spot trends and gauge sentiment, saving you hours of manual work.

Launch and analyze surveys with Contentsquare to quickly gather data for your user personas

Interview your users

Conduct user interviews to understand your customers on an even deeper level. Approach this method with a journalistic mindset to grasp more nuanced user motivations. 

You don’t need to do a huge amount of preparation beforehand—go into the interview with one main question in mind, then keep the conversation going with on-the-spot follow-ups that get people talking more about their lives, their needs, and their frustrations.

Adele Revella, Founder and CEO at Buyer Persona Institute, has the following advice to give about this interview strategy:

The more you learn about your users' thoughts and feelings and why they do what they do, the easier it becomes to see how your product or service fits into their lives.

💡 Pro tip: run virtual interviews using Contentsquare and you won’t even have to leave your desk to chat with real users. Invite your own customers or find your ideal candidates from our diverse pool of over 200,000 participants. Contentsquare automates the entire process, from recruitment and scheduling to hosting and recording, so you can focus on getting insights, not wrangling calendars.

Effortlessly schedule, host, and analyze interviews with Contentsquare

Conduct user tests

Observing how people interact with your website or products can provide valuable insight into the barriers your users face. The purpose of user testing is to expose pain points and areas of confusion in the user experience to gauge a product's practical functionality, specifically how efficiently a user completes a pre-defined goal.

You can use remote, unmoderated user tests to see how people navigate the user journey. Combine them with behavior analytics tools like heatmaps and session recordings (or replays) to reveal key user behaviors, like where people scroll, move, u-turn, and rage click on your site.

Be on the lookout for specific touchpoints people might encounter on their journey, like when they first sign up for your service, navigate a new UX design, or request help with a particular action.

💡 Pro tip: get candid feedback from real people with User Tests in Contentsquare. Automatically invite participants, deliver task instructions, and collect feedback at the end—without requiring a researcher to moderate. See how users engage with your site or product in their own time, and analyze audio and video recordings of their journey to capture nuances you would otherwise miss.

Gather real feedback about your website, product, or UX by running unmoderated user tests

Step 2: analyze your user data

Once you’ve learned all you can about your users, start processing the data you collected in step 1 and break it down into digestible nuggets of information that you can use to craft a fictional persona. Right now, your goal is to identify 1 or 2 user groups to focus on, so you can start improving their experience today.

Analyzing user research data can seem daunting, but we’ve got plenty of resources to help you strategically review and organize your raw data into actionable insights. In addition to our guide for analyzing session recording observations, we created a user persona analysis template that you can copy and reuse. This template is designed with survey responses in mind, but you can easily adapt it to interviews or user tests.

User persona analysis template

To use this spreadsheet template, follow these instructions:

• Open our article on how to analyze survey data in 6 easy steps

• Use the user persona template and follow the steps in the article

• Start spotting patterns

Once you’re done, you’ll have your main demographics, goals, and barriers clearly organized on the spreadsheet.

Next, start by looking at the goals and see whether there’s one that stands out, with 50% of answers or more. If that’s the case, look at the demographics associated with the goal: if you also see a pattern with 50%+ answers from the same demographic, then you have your first user persona.

If you don’t have a clear goal or a clear demographic that stands out, consider arranging them further:

Continue this process until you identify at least 2–3 key goals and corresponding demographics, along with the barriers each one faces.

Step 3: build your user persona

Based on the data you analyze, create one simple user persona that represents the largest chunk of your user base. This user persona should represent your primary user base—the main audience for your business. You can repeat this step to come up with different personas for secondary users or customers from new markets you’re trying to tap into.

You can use this information to fill in our user persona template:

A simple user persona template

And that’s it! Work with the user data you can gather right now, and go from there. As you continue to investigate, you’ll accumulate knowledge and resources to conduct more in-depth research. And however you choose to approach that research, creating these simple personas is a good first step

3 tips to create effective user personas 

When done properly, user personas help you grow and improve your business. Here are 3 final tips to help create effective personas that work:

1. Don’t confuse demographic and persona

Some of the customer persona examples you’ll see online paint quite vivid, clear pictures of a user demographic… and stop right there.

A useful persona is always more than an age, job title, or marital status—it’s supposed to help you understand the motivations, fears, and concerns of your ideal customer and market. Knowing that one of your personas is in their mid-30s and shops online twice a week is useless if you don’t know what’s stopping them from buying products on your website today.

2. Start small, expand later

There are hundreds of eye-catching and really in-depth persona templates out there. It’s tempting, but when you’re just getting started with persona research, and want to get results fast, the 3 attributes we discuss (a key demographic, goal, and barrier) formatted into a simple one-page template is more than enough.

3. Don’t just ‘come up’ with personas: base them on real people

It’s also tempting to just ‘come up’ with user personas based on your or your boss’s understanding of your market and your internal company narrative.

Don’t!

Proper user personas shouldn’t be based on fictional user stories your company invents. Avoid your own bias by asking your real user base simple questions, and let customer insights—and real user data—guide you.

How to take action based on your user persona insights

User personas are useless unless you apply their insights to practice. These fictional characters representing your real users should guide your business’s decision-making processes: introduce them to your product team, design team, and other key stakeholders invested in business decisions, like people from marketing, sales, and operations. Factor personas into your marketing decisions or use them to start brainstorming new product designs.

The end goal of creating user personas is to build a better product that meets your users’ needs precisely. Adjust your messaging accordingly to speak directly to your target users and make design decisions with primary personas in mind, then test those decisions against your secondary personas to maximize your impact.

FAQs about user personas