Anna Zabudska
Marketer
April 7, 2023
Personas are a fundamental task when it comes to app development strategy. You must define your target audience before considering the user interface, business model, and engineering solutions. Once you get to know your target audience, you’ll have enough validated data to guide your next steps. Considering that not every person you contact will be interested in your mobile app, you as a business owner don’t have time and money to modify your strategy. Your marketing efforts should be segmented and cover the right audiences.
Thus, your app tailored to the customers’ needs opens the way to create personalized experiences that resonate with your audience. You can learn what motivates people by conducting user research and crafting comprehensive user personas.
But first, let us determine what user personas are.
A user persona is a collective image of a particular customer group based on accurate data about your audience and market research. You can have more than one user persona and sort them into profiles. The data in these profiles reflect your audience's characteristics and important user habits.
Step into the customer journey to understand the user needs and expectations.
A clear idea of your primary user types is the cornerstone for developing a useful and efficient application.
User personas are incredibly useful for good retention and UX personalization. They help reveal the different ways of searching, paying, and using applications, so you can focus every effort on improving the user experience through real data.
This shows us that user personas matter in making the basis for good personalization and creating a sense of uniqueness while interacting with a product.
Likewise, user personas benefit a business in several ways:
By sharing user personas within a company, you can expect your team to be on the same page. With personas in mind, colleagues can see a consistent path and equally make an effort to hit the needs of key target groups and avoid frustration.
You can better understand users' backgrounds to pinpoint where your real users spend their time and which internet resources they trust. This information allows you to target and promote your app on platforms where potential clients may appear.
Let's say you and your team came up with a new paid service idea for app users. But will it be in demand? Will users pay for it? Buyer personas help eliminate wasted time and money by focusing on the users’ needs.
Considering the users’ personas, it will be easier for designers and product managers to create better products, services, designs, and UX. In turn, developing with personas gives you a great chance to satisfy the needs and preferences of your real users.
After researching, brainstorming, and passing development, custom characters will help you cope with the problems related to product positioning.
In short, user personas enable you to act more productively for business goals, down to transparent decision-making and positioning.
Personas help to identify your company with the audience. But the main points to concentrate on vary depending on your industry.
For instance, if you’re in a B2C setting, you’ll probably be interested in users’ age, habits, and preferences. On the other hand, a B2B-oriented company might focus on its roles and geography.
It is important to remember that a user persona doesn’t have to be over-detailed. Fill in only the data that is applicable to your field. For example, the marital state won’t always be necessary to include.
Here are some features a good user persona may contain:
Persona Name
Think of creating a memorable user archetype. For instance, if your user group doesn’t have technical expertise, you could call them “Alien Sam,” whereas more experienced users may be called “Legend Pierre.”
Photo
We all know that sometimes images can tell more than words. You can find suitable photos in stocks. Try to choose an image that conveys a mix of the user's personality traits, age, and gender.
Personal motto
Make the persona feel more realistic by adding a quote that says a lot.
Bio
Provide more context giving your persona a little history. Where did they grow up? What is their lifestyle? How do they spend their free time? Add some details that help make users unique.
Demographics
Attach age, gender, location, income, or any other representative trait of your customer.
Goals, motivation, and needs
Think of what motivates and drives your customers before they meet your app. And what is the ultimate goal they want to achieve by using it?
Pains and frustrations
Knowing users’ problems should affect your design decisions more than the other attributes. Think about the main issues making users frustrated. The effectiveness of your solutions will depend on your understanding of their pain points.
Personality traits and lifestyle habits
Investigate whether your persona has a short attention span. Are they cautious or impulsive in making decisions? Assigning personality traits might help you understand if you need a faster app design or the option to compare prices.
Not sure where to start? Let’s imagine you are creating a user persona for a food delivery mobile app.
A great example would be Liah Sparks, a busy young woman who works around the clock. Although healthy food is not the name of the game for her, she follows her time management and sticks to the calorie limit.
Here is an example of how you would fill out a user persona template for Liah Sparks:
Name: Liah Sparks.
Photo: For Liah, you can use a stock image representing a businesswoman in her twenties to thirties.
Customer profile/Bio: A busy woman who doesn’t have time to cook. Eating various food and staying slim is one of her primary motivators. She spends a lot of time away from home and is a big food lover. She wants to order online using her smartphone to avoid lineups and hates callbacks from couriers.
Demographic data: Liah is a single girl in her 25s who orders food twice or thrice daily due to her busy schedule. She is a full-time Project manager in a company of 20-50 employees.
Goals, motivations, and needs: Liah wants a wide range of dishes and fast delivery to any part of the city. She also wants to see the calorie count of every ordered dish.
Pain points/frustrations: Liah gets upset about the delivery to the inaccurate location, courier callbacks, and delays.
Personality traits and habits: Sometimes, she makes impulsive orders due to a lack of time.
When building buyer personas, there are a few key steps you need to take. Here we’ll review the complete process of developing personas for your business.
A good user persona is formed from customer discovery and investigating the clients’ needs. Product, design, and marketing teams are usually involved in personas to more accurately represent the types of people who could become users.
When crafting a user persona, consider customer age, demographics, goals, motivation, and behavioral patterns. You can start by interviewing people who fall within your target market to gather these ideas. Conduct one-to-one interviews or prepare surveys. You can ask them about similar apps they have used and what their experience is. Adopt the positive things that people like in other apps. A negative review is an opportunity for you, as you can learn from your competitors' mistakes.
Choose questions that help you evaluate what your users are looking for in the app and what problems they are facing. These questions can help you make important UX/UI decisions.
Another way to explore your audience is through social media. Take a look at your competitor's social media accounts. Social listening can give you a lot of insights into what customers say about the app. You can browse the comment sections for customer feedback.
Moreover, social media can provide information about your audience's interests and who or what they would like to follow. All of these can help you create a user experience that is accurate, thorough, and useful for decision-making.
You should know what will make them use your app. Your customers` goals may be related to their personal or professional lives. You need to see how your app can fit into their lives and help them reach their goals.
For instance, if you're developing an app in the food and drinks category and your user's goal is to order and quickly receive food from restaurants, you'll decide to include features to help them select nearby restaurants and track the delivery status of their order.
If most people in your target audience need similar characteristics, you must consider including them in your app. It will encourage your target audience to download and use your app. When customers see that your app can help them achieve their goals, they will try it.
Along with the goals, you also need to determine what problems your users face. You can get valuable insight into what users expect from an app. Maybe they used your competitor's app and didn't find what they were looking for. There may be design and UX issues, or certain features that can be missing. Customers may also encounter other problems. For instance, given the example above, it can be difficult for them to plan the delivery time by a courier. To solve this problem, you can include notifications in your application that will remind them when the courier has set off and add a map showing the courier`s progress. These may be minor issues the client is having, but providing a solution will help them connect to your application.
Once you have gathered all the information about your audience, start putting all these ideas together. Give your user character a name, and then add all the information. Remember the recommendations given in the preceding paragraph.
Here you got a checklist for it:
A user scenario is a story that designers create to illustrate how a user might behave to achieve a goal or action. User scenarios focus on what kind of experience users will have when using these solutions. Applying this as a tool, development teams can come up with ideas, meet user needs, and test to find optimal options.
Detailed user information will help you determine where to focus your time, guide application development, and ensure company-wide consistency. As a result, you will be able to engage the most valuable users and customers.
There’s no accurate answer to that question.
Here are a few tips when creating user personas for your product:
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Are your pushes as compelling as they could be? Find out with our free preview tool. Instantly see how your notifications will display on iOS and Android, in both expanded and collapsed views.
This is your chance to fine-tune your messages to ensure they're not just seen but felt. Make every character and every push work harder for your engagement goals
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