A short guide to personas

The word âpersonaâ has many meanings. Sometimes the term refers to a part that an actor plays, other times it can mean a famous person, or even a character in a fictional play or book. But in the field of UX, persona has its own special meaning.
Before you get started with creating personas of your own, learn what they are and the process to create one. We’ll even let you in on a great, little tip â how to use Chalkmark to refine and validate your personas.
What is a persona?
In the UX field, a persona is created using research and observations of your users, which is analyzed and then depicted in the form of a personâs profile. This individual is completely fictional, but is created based on the research youâve conducted into your own users. Itâs a form of segmentation, which Angus Jenkinson noted in his article âBeyond Segmentationâ is a âbetter intellectual and practical tool for dealing with the interaction between the concept of the âindividualâ and the concept of âgroupââ.
Typical user personas include very specific information in order to paint an in-depth and memorable picture for the people using them (e.g., designers, marketers etc).
The user personas you create donât just represent a single individual either; theyâll actually represent a whole group. This allows you to condense your users into just a few segments, while giving you a much smaller set of groups to target.
There are many benefits of using personas. Here are just a few:
- You can understand your clients better by seeing their pain points, what they want, and what they need
- You can narrow your focus to a small number of groups that matter, rather than trying to design for everybody
- Theyâre useful for other teams too, from product management to design and marketing
- They can help you clarify your business or brand
- They can help you create a language for your brand
- You can market your products in a better, more targeted way
How do I create a persona?
Thereâs no right or wrong way to create a persona; the way you make them can depend on many things, such as your own internal resources, and the type of persona you want.
The average persona that youâve probably seen before in textbooks, online or in templates isnât always the best kind to use (picture the common and overused types like âBusy Barryâ). In fact, the way user personas are constructed is a highly debated topic in the UX industry.
Creating good user personas
Good user personas are meaningful descriptions â not just a list of demographics and a fake name that allows researchers to simply make assumptions.
Indi Young, an independent consultant and founder of Adaptive Path, is an advocate of creating personas that arenât just a list of demographics. In an article she penned on medium.com, Indi states: âTo actually bring a description to life, to actually develop empathy, you need the deeper, underlying reasoning behind the preferences and statements-of-fact. You need the reasoning, reactions, and guiding principles.â
One issue that can stem from traditional types of personas is they can be based on stereotypes, or even reinforce them. Things like gender, age, ethnicity, culture, and location can all play a part in doing this.
In a study by Phil Turner and Susan Turner titled âIs stereotyping inevitable when designing with personas?â the authors noted: âStereotyped user representations appear to constrain both design and use in many aspects of everyday life, and those who advocate universal design recognise that stereotyping is an obstacle to achieving design for all.â
So it makes sense to scrap the stereotypes and, in many instances, irrelevant demographic data. Instead, include information that accurately describes the personaâs struggles, goals, thoughts and feelings â all bits of meaningful data.
Creating user personas involves a lot of research and analyzing. Here are a few tips to get you started:
1) Do your research
When youâre creating personas for UX, itâs absolutely crucial you start with research; after all, you canât just pull this information out of thin air by making assumptions! Ensure you use a mixture of both qualitative and quantitative research here in order to cast your net wide and get results that are really valuable. A great research method that falls into the realms of both qualitative and quantitative is user interviews.
When you conduct your interviews, drill down into the types of behaviors, attitudes and goals your users have. Itâs also important to mention that you canât just examine what your users are saying to you â you need to tap into what theyâre thinking and how they behave too.
2) Analyze and organize your data into segments
Once youâve conducted your research, itâs time to analyze it. Look for trends in your results â can you see any similarities among your participants? Can you begin to group some of your participants together based on shared goals, attitudes and behaviors?
After you have sorted your participants into groups, you can create your segments. These segments will become your draft personas. Try to limit the number of personas you create. Having too many can defeat the purpose of creating them in the first place.
Donât forget the little things! Give your personas a memorable title or name and maybe even assign an image or photo â it all helps to create a ârealâ person that your team can focus on and remember.
3) Review and test
After youâve finalized your personas, itâs time to review them. Take another look at the responses you received from your initial user interviews and see if they match the personas you created. Itâs also important you spend some time reviewing your finalized personas to see if any of them are too similar or overlap with one another. If they do, you might want to jump back a step and segment your data again.
This is also a great time to test your personas. Conduct another set of user interviews and research to validate your personas.
User persona templates and examples
Creating your personas using data from your user interviews can be a fun task â but make sure you donât go too crazy. Your personas need to be relevant, not overly complex and a true representation of your users.
A great way to ensure your personas donât get too out of hand is to use a template. There are many of these available online in a number of different formats and of varying quality.
This example from UX Lady contains a number of helpful bits of information you should include, such as user experience goals, tech expertise and the types of devices used. The accompany article also provides a fair bit of guidance on how to fill in your templates too. While this template is good, skip the demographics portion and read Indi Youngâs article and books for better quality persona creation.
Using Chalkmark to refine personas
Now itâs time to let you in on a little tip. Did you know Chalkmark can be used to refine and validate your personas?
One of the trickiest parts of creating personas is actually figuring out which ones are a true representation of your users â so this usually means lots of testing and refining to ensure youâre on the right track. Fortunately, Chalkmark makes the refinement and validation part pretty easy.
First, you need to have your personas finalized or at least drafted. Take your results from your persona software or template you filled in. Create a survey for each segment so that you can see if your participantsâ perceptions of themselves matches each of your personas.
Second, create your test. This is a pretty simple demo we made when we were testing our own personas a few years ago at Optimal Workshop. Keep in mind this was a while ago and not a true representation of our current personas â theyâve definitely changed over time! During this step, itâs also quite helpful to include some post-test questions to drill down into your participantsâ profiles.
After that, send these tests out to your identified segments (e.g., if you had a retail clothing store, some of your segments might be women of a certain age, and men of a certain age. Each segment would receive its own test). Our test involved three segments: âthe awareâ, âthe informedâ, and âthe experiencedâ â again, this has changed over time and youâll find your personas will change too.
Finally, analyze the results. If you created separate tests for each segment, you will now have filtered data for each segment. This is the real meaty information you use to validate each persona. For example, our three persona tests all contained the questions: âWhatâs your experience with user research?â And âHow much of your job description relates directly to user experience work?â

Above, youâll see the results for Persona #2. This tells us that 34% of respondents identified that their job involves a lot of UX work (75-100%, in fact). In addition, 31% of this segment considered themselves âConfidentâ with remote user research, while a further 9% and 6% of this segment said they were âExperiencedâ and âExpertâ.

These results all aligned with the persona we associated with that segment: âthe informedâ.
When youâre running your own tests, youâll analyze the data in a very similar way. If the results from each of your segmentsâ Chalkmark tests donât match up with the personas you created, itâs likely you need to adjust your personas. However, if each segmentâs results happen to match up with your personas (like our example above), consider them validated!
For a bit more info on our very own Chalkmark persona test, check out this article.
Further reading
- “From personas to user stories” – an article by Roman Pichler on how to discover the right stories and integrate them into a sprint.
- “Personas make users memorable for product team members” – Aurora Bedford looks at how personas support user-centered design throughout a projectâs lifecycle.
- “Developing successful personas” – Luke Wroblewski presents notes from a talk by Tamara Adlin who outlines a set of practical ways to align stakeholder, developers, and designers to use personas.
- “Describing personas” – Indi Young looks at some of the problems in accurately describing personas.