User Persona Template
Use the user persona template to capture important information about your target audience. Create user personas to gain insight into customer needs and build better products.
About the User Persona Template
A user persona template helps in representing and summarizing a target audience for your product or service that you have researched or observed.
Whether you’re in content marketing, product marketing, design, or sales, you operate with a target audience in mind. Maybe it’s your customer or prospect. Maybe it’s someone who will benefit from your product or service. Usually, it’s a whole collection of personalities and needs that intersect in interesting ways. By distilling your knowledge about a user, you create a model for the person you hope to target: this is a persona.
How to use a persona template
You can easily create a user persona template following these three steps:
1. Purpose This step requires some prep work. Add here any relevant research and data you have regarding your audiences. Afterward, brainstorm with your team about the purpose of building a User Persona template. What decisions do you want to make after you know your user persona? How will it help you?
2. Personas Here is where you will write and describe your user persona. What are their actions, motivations, and pain points? What are their values? In what context do they find themselves? You can copy and paste this frame as many times as you like and add as many user personas as you need.
3. What now Reflect on your findings from previous steps and get together with your team to find out the next steps. What does your persona profile validate? What needs to be changed or not changed? Based on this information, ask yourself these questions and define what to do next.
When should you use a persona template?
It can be difficult to figure out how to approach your target users without a complete understanding of who they are. You can create personas anytime you want a clearer idea of your audience, which will allow you to improve your products and services.
Marketing
Marketers commonly use buyer personas to determine how they should market their product. Buyer personas will inform the marketing channels the business will use, along with the types of advertising and specific tactics to reach this audience.
Sales
Buyer personas are used by salespeople as well to characterize potential leads as they move through the funnel. Categorizing leads into different personas gives salespeople a general idea of the needs of this potential buyer and can help inform sales strategy.
User experience
User personas are also critical for informing a business’s understanding of the user experience and how to improve it. By identifying different target personas that use their product or service and plotting the customer journey for each persona, businesses can better understand common pain points users have with their product/service and what they find valuable. This can also help improve the design process in the future.
Product
Personas help product managers understand the product's key features, besides giving them insights about customers' behaviors, goals, and needs. Like user experience, product teams are interested in knowing how the product adds value to the customer and improve their experience.
Advantages of creating a user persona template
By creating user persona templates, you can gain a richer understanding of your audience. Clearly defining personas gives your team a fuller understanding of your customers and helps you make better product and marketing decisions.
Understand the customer
It’s critical for businesses to gain a deep understanding of their users and what they want, and user personas help them do that. By combining demographic information with information on how users interact with the product, businesses can understand the needs and experiences of their users better.
Identify potential problems
Understanding who your users are is also a critical step towards identifying ways to improve your product for their use. Creating unique customer journey’s for each persona will show you how each persona approaches the product and what their pain points are.
Improve mission alignment
Another benefit of creating personas is that it will help everyone on your team understand what the team’s overarching goals are and give everyone a clear target of the ideal user to shoot for. User personas inform everything from marketing and sales to UX and UI, so making sure all your team members have a basic understanding of your ideal customer is key.
Using the template, what information should be included in a user persona?
The persona template typically includes sections for demographics, behaviors, goals, pain points, motivations, and a persona name. You can also add sections specific to your project or product.
Can I customize the template to include unique characteristics for my target audience?
Yes, you can and should customize the user persona template to reflect your target audience's specific attributes and characteristics to make it as relevant as possible.
How many user persona templates should I create for a project?
It depends on the complexity of your audience. Typically, 2-5 well-defined personas are sufficient for most projects. Avoid creating too many personas, as they can become unmanageable.
Is there a preferred format for presenting the information within the template?
While there isn't a strict format, keeping the persona concise, visually engaging, and easy to understand is essential. Using images and concise summaries is often recommended.
How often should I update user personas?
User personas should be updated whenever significant changes occur in your target audience or when you have new data that provides a more accurate understanding of your users.
Get started with this template right now.
Perceptual Map Template
Works best for:
Marketing, Desk Research, Mapping
To shape your messaging, tailor your marketing, improve your product, and build your brand, you have to know your customers’ perceptions — what they think of you and your competitors. You can gain those insights by exploring a perceptual map. This simple, powerful tool creates a visual representation of how customers rank your price, performance, safety, and reliability. Put this template to work and you’ll be able to size up your competition, see gaps in the market, and understand changes in customer behavior and purchasing decisions.
Reverse Brainstorming Template
Works best for:
Ideation, Brainstorming, Team Meetings
Reverse brainstorming is a technique that prompts a group to think of problems, rather than solutions. Because we naturally think of problems, it’s a great way to get a group to anticipate problems that may occur during a project. To engage in reverse brainstorming, start by identifying the problem, and then think of things that might exacerbate it. Ask your team to generate ideas around ways in which the problem could get worse. Reverse the problems into solutions again, and then evaluate your ideas.
Cynefin Framework Template
Works best for:
Leadership, Decision Making, Prioritization
Companies face a range of complex problems. At times, these problems leave the decision makers unsure where to even begin or what questions to ask. The Cynefin Framework, developed by Dave Snowden at IBM in 1999, can help you navigate those problems and find the appropriate response. Many organizations use this powerful, flexible framework to aid them during product development, marketing plans, and organizational strategy, or when faced with a crisis. This template is also ideal for training new hires on how to react to such an event.
What? So What? Now What? Template
Works best for:
Agile Workflows, Retrospectives, Brainstorming
The What? So What? Now What? Framework empowers you to uncover gaps in your understanding and learn from others’ perspectives. You can use the What? So What? Now What? Template to guide yourself or a group through a reflection exercise. Begin by thinking of a specific event or situation. During each phase, ask guiding questions to help participants reflect on their thoughts and experience. Working with your team, you can then utilize the template to record your ideas and to guide the experience.
Lotus Diagram Template
Works best for:
UX Design, Ideation, Diagrams
Even creative thinkers occasionally need help getting their creative juices flowing. That's where a lotus diagram comes in. It'll empower you to run smoother, more effective brainstorming sessions. This creative-thinking technique explores ideas by putting the main idea at the diagram center and ancillary concepts in the surrounding boxes. This template gives you an easy way to create Lotus Diagrams for brainstorms, as well as an infinite canvas for the endless ideas generated.
Priority Matrix Template
Works best for:
Business Management, Strategic Planning, Prioritization
If you need a little more than a basic to-do list, then you’d probably benefit from a Priority Matrix. The Priority Matrix template is designed to help you determine which tasks are critical so you can focus on the most urgent needs. In a 2x2 matrix, input your priorities based on whether they must be completed with high or low urgency and are of high or low importance. Applicable to project management and personal management alike, use the Priority Matrix template to improve business processes, create efficiency, remove blockers, and reduce operational waste.