The essentials of building a user persona in your UX development phase

UX Design Essentials: Article 3

To define our users’ brand experience, we must research their past interactions and future expectations of our product

Building a user persona is a process. It requires perseverance and good listening skills while conducting research. Analytical skills for synthesizing research are essential. Through this research/synthesis, we can define our user’s concrete and emotional experience with our product.

What exactly is a user persona?

A user persona is a fictional character who represents our audience or our single customer.

Conducting research

In research, we will be asking our users about their past brand experience. For example: Was the product effective? Was it delightful? What was their best and worst experience with the product?

We will then probe users on what they expect their future experience to be. What are their needs? Their habits?

This chart illustrates a research time continuum, gathering data from past to present to future product interactions.

Let’s look at a step-by-step approach, visualizing each building block as we build our persona

Personas come to life one characteristic at a time. This article will help you see the concept of a persona through visuals, each representing an important step toward building the full persona.

Keep in mind, this method can also be used for character development in screenplays, novels, biographies, comic books, and other media.

Stakeholders and project teams rely on user personas to refer to the customer throughout the project cycle

A user persona connects the teams working on the project. Stakeholders might come in…