Updated Oct. 28, 2020: We updated the article with 20 best user persona examples &templates, also design tips and tools to help you create the best user personas quickly.
A good user persona helps you know your target market better and enables you to create a product or service that really meets the user's needs. It serves as the perfect tool to make you and your entire product team communicate and collaborate better. That's why many teams and companies create or look for good user persona templates to guide their website or mobile projects.
In this article, we'll share the best user persona examples and templates to create your own user personas better. All templates are free and downloadable to help you hasten your design process.
Table of contents:
What is a user persona?
Why is a user persona so important？
How to define a user persona？
Best user persona examples & templates
What is a user persona?
A user persona, also called persona, customer persona, or buyer persona, is a typical virtual representation of your target audience. It is generally created based on user research and can help you and your team have a better understanding of your users' goals, pain points, behaviors, and other demographic information. It provides you with a solid base for designing your products to serve the target audience better.
Here is what a good user persona looks like:
4 basic user persona types
User personas can be generally divided into four types according to different usages and understanding perspectives:
Goal-directed user personas
This type of user personas focuses on the goals that a typical user may want to achieve on your website or mobile app product.
It is a good tool to help you and your team simulate what processes and workflows that your users prefer to follow to achieve their needs while interacting with your mobile or website product.
Role-based user personas
Role-based user personas tend to depict users' information according to roles. It makes it easier for your team to have a full idea of users' pain points, behaviors, and goals based on different roles.
These days, many teams and companies choose this type of user personas to present their user needs.
Engaging user personas
Engaging user personas have been designed with engaging characters and stories, making the involved users more vivid and realistic. They make it easier for your entire team to understand the target audience better.
Fictional user personas
Fictional user personas are defined based on the interactions that the previous users have made with your products. Without directly emerging from user research, a fictional user persona describes how a typical user would look. It can be used as an initial sketch of user needs before you start to do enough user research.
What should a user persona include?
In a good and representative user persona, the elements that different types of user personas include can vary from one person to another. However, there are some basic elements or demographic information that your user persona should cover:
Personal info:You are supposed to present the personal information at first, including name, job title, company, brand, job description, family status, and more. It includes any detail that can help your team understand the persona better.
Demographic info:Other demographic information, such as age, gender, income, education, location, and other background information can help you create a more authentic character, not a fake one.
Image: Images speak louder than words. A vivid image, sketch, or cartoon can help your team picture your users clearly, and help you establish a consistent understanding of the target users.
Goals & motivations: You should also make it clear what your audience wants to get or to do with your product. List all possible goals and motivations that you've found from your user research.
Needs & pain points:List out all possible problems, challenges, and even fears that your audience may encounter while interacting with your products. This information can help you create a product that really meets the needs of your users.
In short, any detail included in your user persona can matter when you are trying to create a better product. Try to add as much information as you need when working on a project.
Why is a user persona so important for a product team?
Once you've had a good understanding of the user persona concept, you can learn why you need a user persona while designing a website or mobile app. These are the main benefits that good user personas can bring to you and your team:
Understand your audience better
User persons are generated based on user research, which makes you and your team understand who your users are, their actual needs, behaviors, needs, and other information clearly. All these elements help you understand your audience better and create better products with ease.
Develop a consistent brand language
Defining and sharing user personas across your team or company is a part of the process of establishing a consistent understanding of your target audience. This helps your entire team create a consistent brand language to communicate every detail better.
Create optimal user experiences
Knowing your audience better helps your entire team know how your product can serve them better to create the optimal user experience.
Communicate and collaborate better
Vivid and intuitive user persona images or maps, make it easier for you and your team to convey ideas and collaborate better.
Lay a solid base for marketing campaigns
Having a full idea of the target audiences makes it easier for your marketing teams to work out executable marketing strategies and guide their marketing campaigns smoothly.
How to define a user persona?
We've explained the detailed steps about how to create a user persona in another article:What is and how to create perfect personas step by step. You can easily follow the steps mentioned in that article to create your own persona with ease. To simplify your design process, we've summed up 5 of the basic and the most practical tips that you should follow to create a better user persona for your projects:
Start with real users
To define user personas accurately for your project, not fake ones, you are supposed to interview, research, and analyze a large number of real users. Hundreds or even thousands of users should participate. All possible methods that can help you collect user information, ideas, and feedback should be covered.
Divide your audience into different groups
After researching your audience carefully, you should analyze the user data and divide your audience into different groups according to backgrounds, behaviors, goals, and other relevant information.
Pick the typical groups only, not all
The target users of a website or mobile app project can be very complicated. But, this does not mean you have to analyze them all. To save time and effort, you can easily pick some of the most typical groups and analyze the details in your project.
Generally, 3-5 user groups are good enough to help you analyze the target market.
Create the main structure first and fill details gradually
After having an initial understanding of your audience, it's time to map out your user persona. There is no need to be in a hurry. Take your time to create the main structure and then, try to fill the details gradually.
Choose the right user persona creation tools
If you and your team are in a hurry and need a tool to create your own user persona as soon as possible, effective user persona creation tools are worth considering. These are 3 of the best ones that you should try:
1. Persona Generator - build user personas online based on preset templates
Persona Generator is an online user persona editor that provides users with common preset templates, allowing them to create their own user personas with simple clicks. You can download or share your user persona with a simple link.
2. Uxpressia Persona Online Tool - Create personas online alone or collaboratively
Uxpressia Persona Online Tool is a powerful online persona generator that enables you to work on a persona alone or collaboratively in real-time. Many powerful features have been provided to help you create everything with ease, including persona comparison, auto name and photo generator, customer slider, and so on.
3. User Forge - Create connected user personas, stories, and maps online
User Forge is a powerful online persona creator and tool that allows users to generate and share connected user personas, stories, and maps online with ease. It is a nice tool to power up your design workflow.
No matter what type of web and mobile app you are working on, apart from user personas, many of your design ideas need to be visualized and tested regularly. And a perfect prototyping tool is often essential to help you translate ideas into testable prototypes and hasten your entire design workflow.
20 Best user persona examples & templates you cannot miss in 2020
1. User Persona Example
User Persona Example is a user persona example collection with a cool illustration style. Beautiful colors and creative illustration avatars make this example stand out from other packs easily. If you want to design a different user persona, this illustration user persona example is worth checking.
2. User Persona UX Research
User Persona UX Research is a user persona that presents the personal information, backgrounds, wants and needs, frustrations, and favorite brands of a product designer. It is a good example that you can learn from if you are also working on related user personas.
3. Woman User Persona UX
Woman User Persona UX is a persona example of an interior design app using AR and MR technologies. It has a clean and tidy layout. The persona photo is really eye-catching, making it easier for readers to have a clear understanding of the persona.
4. Persona
Persona is a minimalistic user persona with an illustration style. It has complete personal and background information. It is a good example of how to fit a lot of user information and keep the design clean.
5. User Persona
User Persona is a set of persona examples with detailed user information, making it easier for designers and developers to analyze the habits of users and fasten the entire design process.
6. Karla Garza User Persona
Karla Garza User Persona is a clean and neat user persona example. A lot of lists are used to present the pain points, interests, opportunities, and other personal information. You should check this example for creating a clean and neat persona.
7. Board Game Persona
Board Game Persona is a modern persona concept created for a future board or card game about elderly people. The designers use rich line dividers, hierarchical texts, icons, and more elements to create a clear understanding for readers.
8. Persona Image Carousel
While demonstrating your personal ideas to your team members, developers, clients, or other stakeholders, you can try to make a persona carousel to present all personas in a cool way.Persona Image Carousel is a good example of how to present your personas in a carousel. Check it to learn the details.
9. Psychographic Persona
There isn't any fixed style for designers to present different persona information. So, you can easily choose any style that can present the user information to obtain the best visual result.
Psychographic Persona adopts a unique circular layout to present the top five personality traits of the users, making it easy and intuitive to get a clear view of the user in their mind.
10. User Persona Card
User Persona Card is specially made for a Sports Dashboard project, listing the needs, goals, motivations, and other information of the target users. It is a good example of how to translate user-research findings into user personas.
11. Free User Persona Template Sketch Resource
Free User Persona Template Sketch Resourceprovides several user persona templates that are easy to use. All of them are in Sketch format and free of charge. You can freely choose the one that suits your case best.
12. Free User Persona Template PSD
Free User Persona Template PSDis a collection of different user personas in PSD format. Every template includes all information of users, such as personal info, bio, goals, pain points, scenario, personality, and more, enabling your entire team to customize your own user personas with ease.
13. Free Persona Card Template Sketch
Free Persona Card Template Sketchprovides 12 fully editable user persona cards that you can use to create your own personas with full customization. They can make your design life easier.
14. Free User Persona Template for Social Media Usage
Free User Persona Templateis suitable for social media usage with clear bio, needs, motivations, frustrations, and similar information. It is a good tool for creating a brief persona that does not give much importance to demographic information.
15. User Persona Template PSD Free Download
User Persona Template PSD Free Downloadis shared on Behance. It has a simple and clean layout. It comes in PSD format and is created entirely in vectors, enabling you to resize it to fit your needs with ease.
16. Free UX User Persona Template
Free UX User Persona Templateis a comprehensive user persona template in rich formats like XD, Sketch, and PNG. It is free for both personal and commercial use.
17. Freebie User Persona Template
Are you looking for free templates to create your own persona, empathy maps, or user journeys quickly?Freebie User Persona Templateis absolutely what you are looking for. This freebie is shared in the Sketch format and lists nearly all the information that you need to create a persona.
18. User Persona Black White Free Template
User Persona Black White Free Templateis a clean user persona template with a black and white color scheme. This freebie's size is about 2.5 MB and works perfectly with the Sketch app.
19. UX Persona Template for Travel App
Are you working on a Travel app project?UX Persona Template for Travel Appprovides you with free user persona templates to streamline your design workflow.
20. User Persona Pro Gamer Free Template
User Persona Pro Gamer Free Templateshares the UX related Sketch persona templates for a game. If you are working on a game project, this 2 MB template can be a good inspiration.
Wrap Up
User personas are often created before you and your team starts to design projects. To ensure that your personas accurately represent your target users, you should take your time to research and analyze your users carefully.
We hope that these user persona examples, templates, design tips, and creation tools can help you create accurate user personas and take your project to the next level.
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