The Buyer persona is a fictional profile portraying in a customized, detailed fashion, the most important features of a typical client of a product or service. In other words, it describes a character that doesn’t exist but represents an ideal buyer or some of your ideal buyers.
Building a Buyer Persona, as well as defining the target audience, means that we’ll consider factors such as socio-demographic, economical and behavioral patterns. But also their motivations, preferences, dislikes and personal goals –even their perception of your brand and products.
We can say that while the target audience constitutes a list of features shared by your typical clients, what is the Buyer persona ? the question leads UX designers to an accurate x-ray of the most representative element of that sample.
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What is the Buyer persona for?
Targeting young men aged 20 to 24 is not the same as targeting older men aged 30 to 35 with kids: that age difference only is enough to figure out that consumption patterns of both groups will be pretty different.
Defining the profile of your Buyer persona (or your Buyer personas) will give you a strong starting point and help you shape the content of your marketing campaign according to your needs, and decide which aspects you should focus on.
For instance, the personality of your Buyer persona can give you some clues about the type of radio stations they listen to or the language they usually manage. Counting on this piece of information is important to avoid wasting your marketing budget on radio stations where your ad won’t be reaching the proper target.
Are you familiar with the game Dungeons and Dragons? In the game, you pick a category type, like a magic-user or an elf, and then you create a character using that type, talent statistics, and traits. While the type and traits tell a lot about the character physically, they don’t do much to boil down the personality. So, most players spend time defining personal elements like the character’s hopes, goals, preferences, and family. This makes the character easier to portray because they now have relatable human tendencies, problems, and feelings.
A user persona for user experience is a similar concept. These user profiles, sometimes called model characters or composite characters, are humanized representations of data and experiences from the UX team. By utilizing marketing data collected about various customers, you can create a human-like characterization of your customer groups.
Personas – A Simple Introduction
Personas are fictional characters, which you create based upon your research in order to represent the different user types that might use your service, product, site, or brand in a similar way. Creating personas will help you to understand your users’ needs, experiences, behaviors, and product development goals. Creating personas can help you approach the business in a new ligh. It can help you to recognize that different people have different needs and expectations, and it can also help you to identify with the user you’re designing for. Personas make the design task at hand less complex, they guide your ideation processes, and they can help you to achieve the goal of creating a good user experience for your target user group.
As opposed to designing products, services, and solutions based upon the preferences of the design team, it has become standard practice within many human centred design disciplines to collate research and personify certain trends and patterns in the data as personas. Hence, personas do not describe real people, but you compose your personas based on real data collected from multiple individuals. Personas add the human touch to what would largely remain cold facts in your research. When you create persona profiles of typical or atypical (extreme) users, it will help you to understand patterns in your research, which synthesises the types of people you seek to design for. Personas are also known as model characters or composite characters.
Personas provide meaningful archetypes which you can use to assess your design development against. Constructing personas will help you ask the right questions and answer those questions in line with the users you are designing for. For example, “How would Peter, Joe, and Jessica experience, react, and behave in relation to feature X or change Y within the given context?” and “What do Peter, Joe, and Jessica think, feel, do and say?” and “What are their underlying needs we are trying to fulfill?”
Read the complete reasoning here . Interaction design is one of the leading institutes in User experience.
Why Are User Personas Important?
User personas take the cold calculation out of user experience. It’s easy to get lost in the numbers when you’re studying report after report of failed sales funnels and page bounces. You can often see that an action is happening (or not happening), but it’s often difficult to tell why. Another struggle that a lot of UI designers find is that they can design based on what they find intuitive, but that’s not representative of the skill or thoughts of their target group.
By creating user personas, the designers can easily ask themselves if “Judy” could achieve this goal or if “Frank” would understand how this operation functions.
The concept of user personas first came into play in the mid–1980s. Alan Cooper developed the concept while writing a project management program. After this idea was found to be successful, Cooper later formalized it and wrote several books on the topic. His spark of inspiration ended up being one of the greatest and must utilized strategies in user interface design. What started as a simple idea is now used to optimize experiences online and off, all around the world.
User Persona: Types And Templates
User personas aren’t a one-size-fits-all kind of deal. In order to effectively implement the correct types of character profiles for your project, it’s important to explore the different types of user personas.
What is the first thing that comes up in your mind when you talk about what is the buyer persona? That’s exactly where you can begin
UX design is a no shortcut study, it’s a sure shot method.
Role-Based Personas
First, is a role-based persona. This persona type uses both qualitative and quantitative data to define a perspective based on this persona’s role in an organization. So, if you think about the role this character plays in an organization or process, you can use that information to help with product design. In role-based personas, we consider the user’s duties, business objectives, and functions when creating their user perspective.
Goal-Based Personas
A goal-based persona is a simple one. Basically, your personas’ perspective will be designed around what they want to do with the product you’re developing. Using what you have defined about the character, you can fine-tune and tailor processes to their specific interaction needs.
Engagement-Based Personas
An engagement-based persona combines the goal and role personas into one. This creates a more realistic and well-rounded picture of the character. If you examine more human elements of the persona like their feelings, background, or interests, you can create a persona that feels real. The more realistic the persona, the easier it is to cater to perceive and cater to their needs.
User Persona Templates
As you create user personas, it’s important to use a template that categorizes each character’s information in a thoughtful, easy-to-read way. If you define a template that keeps information clear, it helps you identify key information and critical differences between personas with ease.
If you’re drawing a blank on where to start, it helps to read publicly available user persona templates throughout the web. These resources show exactly how other UX professionals break down their personas into useful categories of information. So, if you’re wondering how to target a customer you’ve not engaged with yet, have little information on, or if you just need more guidance, a pre-made user persona template can help illuminate this process.
How To Create A User Persona?
Now that we’ve covered the basics of user personas, it’s time to create your own user personas. So, let’s gather some data, figure out the story behind it, and create personas that will help your UX design efforts leap to new heights.
User Research
Start the process with user research. UX persona – This can take on many different forms. Surveys are a great way to engage your customers and find out about their wants, needs, and opinions. You can also use your analytics tools and keyword searches to pull relevant search terms and demographic information. Finally, for user experience issues, you can use services like Hotjar, which allow you to see heat maps and recordings of customers interacting with your website. Hotjar can also send quick surveys or ask for instant feedback from your customers.
If your business is more personal or specialized, it’s good to talk to your customers directly. Try giving surveys over the phone or asking clients about their experience when you speak to them.
Once you’ve gathered your research, it’s time to analyze.
Analyze Data
Take note and tag overarching themes that you find within your research. If you’re hearing a lot of comments or complaints in a similar realm, seeing a trend in the types of users that you interact with, or if you’re seeing a problem, make sure to jot it down. You want your personas to truly reflect your customers and goals.
How to study Personas?
Once you’ve analyzed your data, you have to look for patterns. In the previous step, you made notes about themes you’re seeing—is there a pattern? Is it a user that is struggling with this? Do you see what your customers are looking for? As you analyze, categories of different needs or personality types should emerge.
Create Personas
Still, people will be confused and ask what is the buyer persona? A persona needs to more than a collection of data—it needs to feel human. Create a template that defines several personifying aspects of your character, like their name, age, general personality description, motivations, pain points, and goals/preferred outcomes from using your product.
Finally, to really seal the human deal, crown each persona with a photo. Now you can put a face to the name and needs.
Ideally, you’ll create a character for each category that you defined in your analysis. Working on this activity called what is the buyer persona helps you in coming up with a better logo for your brand, creating better social media hacks and creating demand in this economic crisis.
Buyer Personas + UI Design
User personas take the cold, hard data out of design. Instead, they encourage designers to think ethically, with the best interest of real people in mind. A design that is created with a persona in mind is more likely to land with that persona’s category of real customers.
Think about it like this. If you were to design a product and you knew that it would be for 26–35-year-olds who grew up with technology, but that’s all you could define, do you think it would be effective? A design needs to not only be functional but on-brand and created to convert. This information isn’t adequate enough—there are no details!
Instead, let’s say you’re designing a product for Ava. She’s a 28-year-old marketing professional. She’d describe herself as a visual learner who loves minimalism. Ava has a bit of a short attention span and gets frustrated by long processes, especially because she normally uses the internet on her phone. She hates slow load times and shady communication tactics. Her goal is to create a successful eBook.
Well, that’s much easier to design around, isn’t it?
An interface that is created using categories shaped after real-life tends to be much more tailored to their audience’s needs. With at least 4–5 distinct personas, you can create more empathetic and engaging experiences for your users by determining and solving their precise pain points.
Here’s how Alan Cooper recommends using Buyer personas:
In order to successfully unlock what is the buyer persona, one has to take a lot of work to develop and many people just starting out in the UX field struggle to get this skill right. If you’re serious enough about UX to consider it a part of your business, then it’s critical to find the time and funding to create these profiles. Research doesn’t have to be costly—it can be as simple as sending out a survey or picking up the phone.
In order for your personas to be successful, they must be genuine. Unfortunately, persona card templates available on the internet are not good for research. If you try to apply to them to your site, their needs are just as generalized (and sometimes off base) as cold, hard numbers.
User experience is focused on the user—it’s right there in the name. Without proper profiled persona cards, your user experience design and testing are only based on what you think is intuitive, not the user. Crafting well-reasoned and well-researched user personas often pay for itself with improved sales, balanced UX design and customer ratings.
So, go ahead and take that first step—research your customers. Re-evaluate what you think you know about them. As you unlock their wants, needs, and frustrations, you’re sure to find a path to an outstanding user experience upgrade.
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I am sure the next time you ask this question of What is the buyer persona? you will have quite a great understanding of how to approach it in reality!