A “Persona” is a fictional representation of an actual user and is applied in the early stages of product development or product redesign.

Personas are vital to the success of a product because they drive design decisions by taking common user needs and bringing them to the forefront of planning before design has actually started. Personas provide the team with a shared understanding of users in terms of goals and capabilities.

The Benefits of Persona Development

If you don’t think Personas are worth the trouble, think again. Benefits include:

Personas give stakeholders an opportunity to discuss critical features of a redesign: This is especially helpful when you have multiple stakeholders with different ideas about what needs to be developed first. Using Personas to walk stakeholders through common interactions unveils frustrations and pain-points that will help clarify actual user priorities over the stakeholder’s personal wish list.

They help team members share a consistent understanding of the user group: Personas take data and make the stories more compelling and fun, thus making them easier to remember and consider when the team is working towards a solution – together.

Personas help designers develop informed wireframes and site architecture: Since Personas focus on the needs of the users, the team can walk through scenarios and determine optimal placement of content to specifically support the goal of the product. This is vital to the success of a website or application, and will save your client thousands in budget and/or man-hours reworking a product after it’s launched (and “officially” tested by actual users).

Personas provide a “face” to the user story, creating more empathy and understanding about the person using the product: This prevents designers and developers from applying their own mental models to the product design which may not align with actual user needs.