A user persona is a short, realistic profile of one type of customer: who they are, what they are trying to get done, what worries them and where they will be when they visit your site. It turns "our customers" into a specific person you can design and write for.
What goes into a persona
A useful persona fits on one page. It usually has a name and a one-line summary, the main goal that brings them to you, the questions they need answered before acting, their objections and fears, the device and situation they browse in, and the words they use to describe their problem. Demographic detail such as age or hobbies only belongs if it changes a design decision.
The idea was popularised in software by Alan Cooper in the late 1990s. Marketing teams use a close cousin, the buyer persona, which leans more on purchase triggers and decision makers. For a website the two overlap heavily.
How personas are built
Good personas come from evidence: customer interviews, sales and support conversations, reviews (yours and competitors'), search terms and analytics. You look for patterns in goals and behaviour, then group them. Two or three personas cover most small businesses. A persona invented in a meeting without talking to anyone tends to describe the team's assumptions, not customers.
A worked example: an accountant's website
A small accounting firm reviews its last thirty enquiries and finds two clear groups. "First-year freelancer Priya" has just gone self-employed, is anxious about getting a tax return wrong, and wants a fixed price and plain explanations; she browses on her phone in the evening. "Growing-shop owner Tom" has staff, is frustrated with his current bookkeeper's slow replies and cares about payroll and response times; he compares firms on a laptop at work. The firm writes a dedicated page for each, with Priya's leading on fixed fees and Tom's on turnaround and payroll.
When personas are worth the effort
If you serve one obvious type of customer, a persona may add little. They earn their keep when different groups want different things from the same site, when you are writing new pages and need to decide what to leave out, or when several people (a designer, a copywriter, you) need to agree on who the site is for. They also feed directly into mapping the customer journey for each group.
Persona mistakes
- Making them up. Without research, a persona just gives your guesses a name.
- Too many. Eight personas means nobody remembers any of them.
- Irrelevant detail. Favourite coffee and pet names add colour but rarely change a page.
- Writing them and filing them away. A persona only helps if you check new pages against it.
Related terms
- Customer journey: the path each persona takes from first search to purchase.
- User flow: the on-site steps a persona follows to finish a task.
- UX design: the practice personas are a research tool for.
- Usability testing: recruiting real people who match a persona to try your site.