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Creating a persona

A “Persona” is a fictional representation of an actual user of your product. Use them to…

  • Drive design decisions by taking common user needs to design a new feature
  • Get a clear understanding of users, in terms of goals and challenges
  • Analyze the jobs that this persona wants to get done with your product

Personas can be immensely helpful for you as an entrepreneur or creator because you paint a clear picture of your current understanding of your audience members. You can share this with your colleagues so that you all work towards the same goals.

Create the persona itself#

You can create a persona, using these steps:

  1. In the menu on the left, click on Personas
  2. Click the button Create first persona (or Create another persona)
  3. Enter a name and a short About text with a basic statement that characterizes your persona
  4. Confirm with Create persona.

In this example, we create a persona called Jim Blogger, assuming that you want to help bloggers with a product or service you will design later, as soon as you know more about the jobs that a blogger needs to get done:

Creating a persona

Fill it with your assumptions#

You will now get into a more elaborate view of your persona where you can write down everything you know or assume about this fictional representation (called "Jim Blogger" in this example):

  1. their attitude in general
  2. the behavior you observed or assumed
  3. the goals they have
  4. the challenges they face
  5. you can also adapt the About text once more

Fill persona with details

Click on the small pencil icon next to Attitude, Behavior, Goals, Challenges, or About.

A box will appear that you can fill with text. Format the text with Markdown syntax if you like, e.g. bullet point lists with a minus sign before each sentence.

Finally, confirm your edit with the TAB key.

As a step 6, you can upload a fake profile image that represents your idea of what a typical user of your product might look like (Unsplash has lots of free photos, by the way).

After step 6, your blogger persona might look like this:

Full blogger persona

Thanks to Unsplash for the photo: