User persona survey template: get to know who you're really building for

Understanding your customers isn’t just helpful—it’s essential to building anything worth using. But getting a clear picture of who they are doesn’t need to drain your budget or bury your team in sticky notes and vague brainstorms.

There’s a smarter way: ask them.

A user persona survey helps you cut through the noise and learn who your users really are—what they do, what they need, and what’s slowing them down. It gives you the kind of clarity that powers better product decisions, sharper messaging, and more thoughtful design.

You’re not left guessing which features to build, who you’re speaking to, or why something isn’t landing. Instead, you’re working from real feedback that helps you step into your users’ shoes—and stay there. 

With this survey, you'll learn:

• Who your users are and how they describe themselves 

• What their main goal is

• The barriers users face 

• How they use your product today

Deeply understand your users

A user persona is a semi-fictional character based on your current (or ideal) customer. Personas can be created by talking to users and segmenting them by various demographic and psychographic data to improve your product marketing.

This user persona survey template will help you build these personas based on reliable feedback from your users. Building user personas helps you grow and improve your business. It reveals the different ways people search for, buy, and use your product—helping you focus and prioritize your efforts.

PDF conversion app Smallpdf used a user persona survey template to understand their users better. Thanks to the survey template, Smallpdf learned that students, teachers, designers, administrators, lawyers, medical professionals, and real estate agents made up their list of most common users. They learned what goals they had and the barriers they faced. 

With this insight, they were able to optimize their product and increase their Net Promoter Score® (NPS®). 

"With all the changes said and done, we've cut our original error rate in four, which is huge. We increased our NPS® by +1%, which isn't huge, but it means that of the users who received a file, they were still slightly happier than before, even if they didn't notice that anything special happened at all.” 

- Kristina Wagner, Interaction Designer, Smallpdf

💡Pro tip: to replicate what Smallpdf achieved, use Contentsquare’s user persona survey template. 

The template gallery in Contentsquare’s Surveys tool comes packed with all the questions you need. What’s more, the template is fully customizable, meaning you can change the question order, add your questions, and tweak the design.

Choose the perfect type of survey that best fits your needs with Contentsquare’s Surveys tool

3 questions you’ll be able to answer

Here are the 3 questions you’ll be able to answer after launching a successful user persona survey:

1. Who are my users? 

It sounds obvious, but deeply understanding who your users are is crucial when determining how to improve your product. With most digital products, it can be difficult to identify what type of people buy your product. Learning their profession, their background, and their demographics help you improve. 

2. What are my users trying to achieve?

This is so you can understand how your product or service actually fits into your users’ and customers’ lives. Why are they buying/using it? What job are they trying to get done with it, and what problem are they trying to solve?

3. What barriers do they face? 

Now that you know who your users and customers are and what they are trying to accomplish, there’s one more thing to find out: what is stopping them from buying your product, or using it more often/better/more expertly?

An example of a Contentsquare user persona survey

How to set up a user persona survey with Contentsquare in seconds

Getting started with Contentsquare’s user persona survey is fast and easy. 

1. Navigate to Surveys in Contentsquare from the left-hand menu

2. Click ‘New Survey’ in the upper-right corner

3. Choose to start from scratch or use one of 40+ templates—like the user persona template—then customize it as needed

Once set up, your survey is ready to send to customers and start gathering valuable insights.

📌 Reminder: ensure the Contentsquare tag is installed on your site. This tracking code allows you to host the survey live on your site rather than via an external URL. This might be useful if you want to show the user persona survey to users on a certain page. It’ll also mean you’ll be able to access all of Contentsquare’s existing features.

Don’t worry, installing the tag won’t slow your website down. And it doesn’t cost you anything (our free plans are free forever). To set up your full Contentsquare account and install the tag, follow these steps, or simply use the Contentsquare and Google Tag Manager integration.

FAQs about the user persona survey template