Personas are fictional users whose goals and characteristics represent the needs of a larger group of users. Each persona that you create will represent a group of users with similar characteristics that you’ve learned about through your research. Personas are key to the design process because they reflect the lifestyles of users and give your team an idea of how to meet users’ needs or challenges.
Before you start building a persona, user research should first be conducted to know who we are talking about. Through the user research, you identify common pain points. Pain points are user experience issues that frustrate and block the user from achieving their goal in the product.
Each persona should have the most common themes in your data collected from users. For example, if you have an app for a pet walking service and users between the ages of 40-60 showed concerns about the pet walkers having access to the home, this would be a pain point that is included in that specific persona. Ideally, you should create 3 to 8 personas to represent your user database.
Using these personas, you can examine the pain points and come up with solutions on how to fix these issues. For example, with the pet sitting application, you can include in the designs that the dog walkers go through a very thorough screening to pass the background checks.
