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How to create a user persona in 3 steps (with a free template)
Even though they’re buying or using the same product, your users and customers have different needs and are drawn to different things. That’s where user personas come in—to help you make sense of what people are expecting to get out of your business and learn how you can deliver that to them.
Summary
Developing an accurate picture of your users doesn’t need to cost you large amounts of money and effort. In this article, learn
What is a user persona?
A user persona is a semi-fictional character that portrays a group of users within your user base. Creating a persona profile involves observing, talking to, and segmenting your users by various demographic and psychographic data.
Why should you create user personas?
Creating data-driven user personas allows you to empathize with your target audience(s) so you can better understand the diverse wants and needs of the real people who use your website or product. Personas help uncover different use cases for how people browse, buy, and use products—valuable insight you can harness to improve the user experience (UX) and integrate into a customer-centric marketing strategy, product development, or UX design process.
Run surveys, discover valuable insights about your users, and implement data-driven changes with Hotjar.
What should a user persona consist of?
User personas come in various shapes and sizes, but there are three main things you need to identify to start building a compelling profile:
A key demographic
A key goal
A key concern or barrier
From there, you’ll develop a ‘persona’ that embodies these traits, almost as if you were fleshing out a fictional character for a book or screenplay.
Here’s an example:
A user persona example representing ‘busy professionals’ who use Swiggy, an online food ordering and delivery platform (Crayon'd)
You can get as creative as you like designing a polished, lifelike persona profile, but you can accomplish the same thing without getting super fancy.
Let’s go through the basics of researching and building a streamlined user persona for your business.
How to create a user persona in 3 steps
By the end of this basic workflow, you’ll be able to create a streamlined user persona profile that looks something like this:
All you have to do is follow three simple steps—you won’t even need to leave your desk.
Step 1: learn all you can about your users
The key to building compelling user personas is getting to know your real users first. There are different research methods at your disposal to help you collect relevant qualitative and quantitative data that gets to the heart of user needs.
Whatever research methods you end up using, focus on answering the following questions about your users:
Who are they?
What are their main goals?
What are their main barriers to achieving this goal?
Here are three methods you can apply to gather this information:
Survey your users
Place an on-site survey on your most visited pages to collect your users’ demographic information and find out what they have to say about themselves in their own words.
Your first survey doesn’t have to be perfect; it just needs to get you closer to understanding your customers by asking them a few open-ended questions like these:
Describe yourself in one sentence, e.g. “I am a 30-year-old marketer based in Dublin who enjoys writing articles about user personas.”
What is your main goal for using this website/product?
What, if anything, is preventing you from achieving that goal?
👤 Personas in practice
The Swiss-based PDF firm Smallpdf could have sent long surveys to their customers, spent days interviewing them, or even hired an expensive market research company. Instead, they used Hotjar Surveys to create a five-question poll that ran on their homepage for a couple of weeks, until it reached 1,000 answers.
They asked users
What are you using Smallpdf for right now?
What kind of documents do you process with Smallpdf?
What is your profession?
Are you a Pro (paying) user?
What was the last PDF-related task you struggled with?
Most of their users didn’t answer all five questions, but that was still okay because what Smallpdf learned from the thousand-some-odd replies (to the first three) gave them a starting place to spot some overarching trends and start getting a sense of distinct user groups.
💡 Pro tip: use Hotjar Surveys to design and launch a survey in minutes. Our easy-to-use drag-and-drop builder gives you complete control over the look and feel of your survey—run it as an inconspicuous pop-up, or embed it directly on the page at key customer journey touchpoints.
We also have a free user persona survey template to get you started, or you can automate the entire process with AI for Surveys, which will build a survey based on your persona goal and generate a practical summary report of the responses you collect.
Interview your users
Conduct basic user interviews to understand your customers on an even deeper level. Approach this method with a journalistic mindset to grasp more nuanced user motivations.
You don’t even need to do much prep beforehand—go into the interview with one main question in mind, then keep the conversation going with on-the-spot follow-ups that get people talking more about their lives, their needs, and their frustrations.
Adele Revella, Founder and CEO at Buyer Persona Institute, has the following advice to give about this interview strategy:
The only scripted question I want you to ask them is this: Take me back to the day when you first decided that you needed to solve this kind of problem or achieve this kind of goal. Not to buy my product; that’s not the day. We want to go back to the day when you thought it was urgent and compelling to spend money to solve a particular problem or achieve a goal. Just tell me what happened.
The more you learn about your users' thoughts and feelings and why they do what they do, the easier it becomes to see how your product or service fits into their lives.
👤 Personas in practice: as part of their research project, Smallpdf interviewed people from a potential user group: university professors at a local graduate school. Unfortunately, they learned that the school was mostly paperless and rarely used PDFs, so they moved on to another potential user group. This may sound like a failure, but if they never discovered that, they might have wasted time and resources trying to target a demographic that didn’t need their product.
💡 Pro tip: use Hotjar Engage and you won’t have to leave your desk to chat with real users. Engage lets you conduct remote interviews and automates the entire process, from recruitment and scheduling to hosting and recording.
You can interview your own users or connect with people from our diverse pool of 200,000+ participants from 130+ countries and 25 industries, which is particularly beneficial if you’re just starting a business and want to set yourself up for success by identifying potential user personas from the get-go.
Conduct usability testing
Observing how people interact with your website or products can provide valuable insight into the barriers your users face. The purpose of usability testing is to expose pain points and areas of confusion in the user experience to gauge a product's practical functionality, specifically how efficiently a user completes a pre-defined goal.
You can use remote, unmoderated testing methods to see how people navigate the user journey. Website analytics tools like heatmaps and sessions recordings reveal key user behaviors, like where people scroll, move, u-turn, and rage-click on your site.
Be on the lookout for specific touchpoints people might encounter on their journey, like when they first sign up for your service, navigate a new UX design, or request help with a particular action.
👤 Personas in practice: though Smallpdf didn’t conduct usability testing with their own product, they did observe the PDF-related behaviors of two potential user groups out in the wild. First, they watched university students studying at local cafes and libraries, then they sat down with university admin assistants to follow their daily workflows. By observing the challenges these user groups faced when using PDFs, Smallpdf knew which of their products to target for improvement.
💡 Pro tip: just like with interviewing, you don’t need to leave your chair to start observing users—use Hotjar Recordings to watch how people navigate your pages and products. Recordings lets you follow the entire user journey on your site so you can witness key behavior patterns and barriers firsthand, and even filter recordings by specific user demographics for granular observation.
A Hotjar session recording that captures user behavior
Start building a user persona today
Watch recordings for free to discover valuable insights about your users, and implement data-driven changes with Hotjar.
Step 2: analyze your user data
Once you’ve learned all you can about your users, start processing the data you collected in step one and break it down into digestible nuggets of information that you can use to craft a fictional persona. Right now, your goal is to identify one or two user groups to focus on, so you can start improving their experience today.
Analyzing user research data can seem daunting, but we’ve got plenty of resources to help you strategically review and organize your raw data into actionable insights. In addition to our guide for analyzing session recording observations, we created a user persona analysis template that you can copy and reuse. This template is designed with survey responses in mind, but you can easily adapt it to interviews.
To use this spreadsheet template, follow these instructions:
Open our article on a 5-step method to analyzing open-ended questions
Use the user persona template and go through steps 1–4 of the article
Instead of analyzing the three questions individually as the article suggests, analyze them together so you can spot patterns faster
Once you’re done, you’ll have your main demographics, goals, and barriers clearly organized on the spreadsheet.
Next, start by looking at the goals and see whether there’s one that stands out, with 50% of answers or more. If that’s the case, look at the demographics associated with the goal: if you also see a pattern with 50%+ answers from the same demographic, then you have your first user persona.
If you don’t have a clear goal or a clear demographic that stands out, consider arranging them further:
Continue this process until you identify at least 2–3 key goals and corresponding demographics, along with the barriers each one faces.
👤 Personas in practice: thanks to their demographic survey question (What is your job title?), Smallpdf learned that students, teachers, designers, administrators, lawyers, medical professionals, and real estate agents were their most common users.
Through their goal questions (What are you using Smallpdf for right now? and What kind of documents do you process with Smallpdf?), they understood how each group used the tool for largely different purposes, which they needed to address.
And with their barrier question (What was the last PDF-related task you struggled with?), they now also had a clear picture of what they needed to fix and what features they could add to pre-empt user errors.
Step 3: build your user persona
Based on the data you analyze, create one simple user persona that represents the largest chunk of your user base. This user persona should represent your primary user base—the people you had in mind when you first decided to start your business. You can repeat this step to come up with different personas for secondary users or customers from new markets you’re trying to tap into.
You can use this information to fill in our user persona template:
A simple user persona template
And that’s it! Work with the user data you can gather right now, and trust that any information is better than no information. As you grow your business, you’ll accumulate knowledge and resources to conduct more in-depth research. And however you choose to approach that research, creating these simple personas is a good first step
🔍 Check out these user persona examples for further inspiration.
👤 Personas in practice: Smallpdf came up with this simple user persona:
One of Smallpdf’s user personas
And what came next? Smallpdf powered up their PDF to Word tool with optical character recognition technology, so their users could extract text from any PDF or image. They also added localization packages in several common languages, specifically so that administrators around the world could reproduce scanned documents accurately.
Eventually, the changes they implemented based on their user personas increased the tool's success rate by an impressive 75%; their NPS also increased slightly.
3 tips to create effective user personas
When done properly, user personas help you grow and improve your business. Here are three final tips to help create effective personas that work:
1. Don’t confuse demographic and persona
Some of the customer persona examples you’ll see online paint quite vivid, clear pictures of a user demographic…and stop right there.
A useful persona is always more than an age, job title, or marital status—it’s supposed to help you understand the motivations, fears, and concerns of your ideal customer and market. Knowing that one of your personas is in their mid-30s and shops online twice a week is useless if you don’t know what’s stopping them from buying products on your website today.
2. Start small, expand later
There are hundreds of eye-catching and really in-depth persona templates out there. It’s tempting, but when you’re just getting started with persona research, and want to get results fast, the three attributes we discuss (a key demographic, goal, and barrier) formatted into a simple one-page template is more than enough.
3. Don’t just ‘come up’ with personas: base them on real people
It’s also tempting to just ‘come up’ with user personas based on your or your boss’s understanding of your market and your internal company narrative.
Don’t!
Proper user personas shouldn’t be based on fictional user stories your company invents. Avoid your own bias by asking your real user base simple questions. The first rule of business, as marketing expert Mark Ritson puts it, is that you’re not the customer. Remember this, and let customer insights guide you.
How to take action based on your user persona insights
User personas are useless unless you apply their insights to practice. These fictional characters representing your real users should guide your business’s decision-making processes: introduce them to your product team, design team, and other key stakeholders invested in business decisions, like people from marketing, sales, and operations. Factor personas into your marketing decisions or use them to start brainstorming new product designs.
The end goal of creating user personas is to build a better product that meets your users’ needs precisely. Adjust your messaging accordingly to speak directly to your target users and make design decisions with primary personas in mind, then test those decisions against your secondary personas to maximize your impact.
Start building a user persona today
Use Hotjar’s tools to discover valuable insights about your users, and implement data-driven changes.
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