A user persona, or a UX persona, is a fictional representation of your target audience that is meant to help product teams step into the target audience’s shoes, empathize with end-users, and create better, more innovative digital products and services.
A UX persona inspires creativity and innovation, is a prerequisite for user-centricity, and helps acquire buy-ins from the leadership team.
What is the difference between a buyer persona and a user persona?
A buyer persona is used by marketing teams, whereas a user persona is created for UX and product design teams.
The target audience is the same, but the needs of the teams differ. Whereas buyer personas are created to understand your target audience's buying process, user personas focus on the areas of the target audience's life your product or service addresses.
User personas help your design team build better products.
Apart from providing the information on the customers' demographics, personas aim to tell your design team how and why customers use/need your product or services.
They cover the emotions, goals, and ambitions your users have; as well as their hindrances. By doing so, they let product designers empathize with the end-users to build better, user-centric solutions that solve real problems in an innovative way.
To be effective, user personas cannot be products of your imagination or guesswork.
They must be representations of your actual best customers. That is why user persona creation must be backed up with data and input from your target audience.
How to create a user persona may sound like a daunting question, but the process is anything but complicated. A short survey is a perfect way to kick-start your user research.
Not only will it validate your initial assumptions about the personas, but it'll also provide you with quantitative (and qualitative) data. It'll make it easy for you to arrange user interviews to deepen your understanding and obtain more insights into the customers/users.
The answer to this question is… as you might expect: It varies.
The questions you ask will largely depend on whether you're only beginning the work on the product and you have no user base. Or, you already have an MVP and some user base, but you feel you need to learn more about them to hone your value proposition. They'll also depend on the type of insights you want to gain and what your user persona template looks like.
Whatever your situation is, make sure you ask about:
Gauge how vital these things are for them so that you know how to prioritize the findings. And, collect the contact details so that you can get in touch to learn some more.
For specific questions, check out our user persona survey template above.
Running a survey is pretty straightforward with Survicate. All it takes is 5 steps.
On clicking the button next to the template's preview above, you'll be encouraged to sign up for our Flexible plan. It allows you to use the tool free of charge until collecting the first 100 responses.
(To choose a more robust plan, please see our pricing page.)
Once you've looked around the tool:
1. Edit and customize the user persona survey template
The survey template is practically ready to use. Tweak it according to your needs. Change the color palette and the background if you want to enhance your branding.
PRO TIPs:
2. Configure and set up the campaign
Configure the campaign by setting response limits and deciding on the campaign's duration. It's particularly important if you send it to your user base, as opposed to a target audience at large.
The less diverse your user base is and the fewer personas you're creating, the fewer respondents you need. Setting up response limits will let you send the UX persona survey to the right number of users. This way you’ll be able to send other surveys in the future without worrying about spamming your user base.
In the next step, the tool will ask you to select a 3rd party tool you will use to distribute the surveys.
It's an optional step we recommend taking. If you're going to email the survey, select the marketing automation tool you will use.
This will let you see the identity of the respondents and their contact information. You'll be able to get back to them to arrange the user persona interviews. (You can skip the contact form part in the survey if you're using this feature!)
3. Connect 3rd party tools
This step is obligatory only if it's the first time you're sending a survey campaign with Survicate.
To use the integrations Survicate offers, you need to enable them. Go through the list and choose the ones you want to use:
Connecting Google Sheets to Survicate will be handy if you want to work on the responses in the Google tool.
Survicate walks you through the integration process. No coding skills are required!
4. Send the survey
Now, you're ready to distribute the survey through your chosen communication channel. If you email it, embed the survey in the email body (copy the code generated by the feedback collection tool). It will significantly boost the survey response rates.
5. Analyze the results.
Survicate gives you real-time access to survey responses.
Keep track of them in the tool's panel, where you'll find a response breakdown and a word cloud showing the predominant phrases the respondents used.
Or use your product management platform to easily analyze the responses against other user data. Connect the dots by comparing descriptions of the users' context with how they actually use the tool.
By doing so, you'll also be able to identify your best customers and cherry-pick them for user interviews.
Check out the user persona template now, get to know your customers, and build user-centric products people love! 🚀
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