User Persona
A research-based profile of a user type — their goals, context, constraints and behaviour — used to keep design decisions grounded in a real audience.
Deliverables & ArtifactsA useful persona records what changes decisions: the job the person is doing, the environment they do it in, their expertise, their constraints, and what they are trying to avoid. A clinician entering results between appointments on a shared workstation implies different design choices from an analyst with two monitors and an hour. Demographics, stock photos and invented names add nothing.
Personas built from a workshop rather than user research are assumptions with a face attached, and they are worse than none because they lend authority to guesses. Two or three honest personas drawn from interviews beat five polished ones, and the test is whether they ever settle an argument.
In practice
A lab ERP was designed for 'the lab manager'. Interviews found two distinct users: technicians entering data on a tablet beside equipment, and managers reviewing on desktop. Before: one interface served both badly. After splitting into a tablet entry view and a desktop review view, both groups' task times dropped. The catch — two views to maintain instead of one.
Learn more
You may ask
Frequently Asked Questions
How many personas should we have?
Usually two or three. More than that and teams stop remembering them; if you genuinely have five distinct audiences with conflicting needs, that is often a signal the product scope is too broad.
Do personas need photos and names?
No, and they can be actively harmful — a stock photo invites the team to imagine a person rather than use the research. What matters is the goal, the context, the constraint and the behaviour, each traceable to a real interview.
Related terms
All terms- User ResearchThe systematic study of users' goals, behaviour and context — through interviews, observation and analysis — to inform what gets designed and built.
- Customer Journey MapA visualisation of everything a customer does, thinks and feels across the whole relationship with a company, including steps outside the product.
- User FlowA diagram of the path a user takes through an interface to finish one task, including every decision point, branch and error state.
- Usability TestingWatching real users attempt real tasks in a product or prototype to find where they struggle, without steering them.
Let's talk about your product.
Happy to look at what you're building and say where design would move the needle.
Contact Us