User persona survey

Understanding your customers is vital. But developing an accurate picture of your customers doesn’t need to cost you large amounts of money and effort.

With this user persona survey template, you’ll get a clear idea of who they are, so you can improve your website & product experience for them. If you’re unsure what a user persona is or how you analyze user feedback to build a user persona, then start by reading our guide.

With this survey, you'll learn:

• Who your users are and how they describe themselves 

• What their main goal is

• The barriers users face 

• How they use your product today

Make it your own:

• Tweak each question in the template or add your own

• Change the color scheme

• Remove Hotjar branding (with Scale and Business plans)

• Pick between full screen, pop-up or external link Surveys

Deeply understand your users

A user persona is a semi-fictional character based on your current (or ideal) customer. Personas can be created by talking to users and segmenting by various demographic and psychographic data to improve your product marketing.

This user persona survey template will help you build these personas based on real reliable feedback from your users. Building user personas help you grow and improve your business. It reveals the different ways people search for, buy and use your product—helping you focus and prioritize your efforts.

Smallpdf (a free app to convert PDF files) used our user persona survey template to better understand their users. Thanks to the survey template, Smallpdf learned that students, teachers, designers, administrators, lawyers, medical professionals, and real estate agents made their list of most common users. They learned what goals they had and the barriers they faced. 

With this insight, they were able to improve their product and increase their NPS score. 

"With all the changes said and done, we've cut our original error rate in four, which is huge. We increased our NPS by +1%, which isn't huge, but it means that of the users who received a file, they were still slightly happier than before, even if they didn't notice that anything special happened at all.” Kristina Wagner - Interaction Designer, Smallpdf

To replicate what Smallpdf achieved, you can use this user persona survey template. It comes packed with all the questions you need. What’s more, the template is fully customizable, meaning you can change the question order, add your questions, and tweak the design.

3 questions you’ll be able to answer

Who are my users? 

It sounds obvious, but deeply understanding who your users are is crucial for determining how to improve your product. With most digital products, it can be difficult to determine what type of people buy your product. Learning their profession, their background, and their demographics can help you improve. 

What are my users trying to achieve?

This is so you can understand how your product/service actually fits into your users’ and customers’ lives. Why are they buying/using it? What job are they trying to get done with it, what problem are they trying to solve?

What barriers do they face? 

Now that you know who your users and customers are and what they are trying to accomplish, there’s one more thing to find out: what is stopping them from buying your product, or using it more often/better/more expertly?

Set up the user persona survey in seconds

Getting started with the user persona survey is fast and easy. Start by clicking the ‘Get started with this template’ link at the top of the page. 

Once you’ve pressed that you’ll be asked to create an account and verify your email. 

After you’re verified, you’ll be taken straight to the survey template which will be ready for you to send out to customers to start collecting insights. 

However, you’ll also have the option to install the Hotjar tracking code on your site. This tracking code will allow you to host the survey live on your site rather than via an external URL. This might be useful if you want to show the user persona survey to users on a certain page. It’ll also mean you’ll be able to access all four of the Hotjar features.

Don’t worry, installing the tracking code won’t slow your website down. And it doesn’t cost you anything (our free plans are free forever). So, to set up your full Hotjar account and install the tracking code, follow these steps.