What Are User Personas? How to Create Personas in 4 Steps | Hotjar Blog (2023)

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Today, I’ll walk you through the basics of researching and building a simple user persona for your business, which will look something like this:

A simple, no-frills example of a user persona

To keep this practical, I’ll use a real-life example from Swiss-based companySmallpdf. They had a few assumptions about who their users were, but no actual data to back them up: so they set up a simple survey on their homepage, and used the answers as a launchpad to build very basic user personas and run more in-depth research. Tailoring their website and products to meet these personas’ needs increased the success rate of their tool by 75% and increasedNet Promoter Score® (NPS)by 1%.

Let me show you how they did it so you can do the same yourself:

• What is a user persona and why does it matter?

• What should a user persona consist of?

• A simple user persona example

• How to create a persona: 4 steps

• 5 tips for creating terrific user personas

What is a user persona?

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 andpsychographicdata to improve your product marketing.

Why we need user personas:

User personas are extremely useful to grow and improve a business: they help uncover the different ways people search for, buy, and use products, so you can focus your efforts on improving the experience for real people and use cases.

Why did Smallpdf need personas?

Smallpdfis a free, straightforward web app that makes it easy for users to edit and convert PDF files into a variety of formats:

Smallpdf’s current (Nov 2018) homepage

The tool is technically the same for everybody, but when it comes to PDF needs there are huge differences between, say, admins who need to create word documents from printed sheets of paper, and the way I might need to password-protect an ebook draft.

Anyway: Smallpdf had very general assumptions about who their users were, and no clear associations between what someone’s profession was and what features they were using.Even though the team didnotthink of this as 'creating personas', they embarked on a research project to identifytheir main user demographics and their goals, which in turnhelped them better understand their users and improve their tools.

What should a user persona consist of?

Let’s start with some basic theory. A simple persona, like the ones Smallpdf eventually created, answers the following questions:

• Who are you?

• What’s your main goal?

• What’s your main barrier to achieving this goal?

Think about it: even though they’re buying or using the same product, your users and customers have different needs and are drawn to different things. So when youask these survey questions on your website, the answers allow you to paint a clear picture of:

Who are they?

You’re looking for details like “B2C marketer who works for a large company” or “office admin who manages digital and print correspondence,” which sum up a lot about your persona’s perspective when it comes to choosing and using your product.

What are their goals?

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 are the barriers preventing them from achieving their goals?

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?

Let’s put this into the context of Smallpdf.

The 5 questions Smallpdf used to build user personas

To build their persona, Smallpdf used five questions:

1. What are you using Smallpdf for right now?

2. What kind of documents do you process with Smallpdf?

3. What is your profession?

4. Are you a Pro (paying) user?

5. What was the last PDF-related task you struggled with?

Notice how questions 1 and 2 are about goals, questions 3 and 4 about demographics, and question 5 is about barriers and concerns.

Now, most of their users didn’t finish all five; but that was still okay because what Smallpdf learned from the thousand-some-odd replies (to the first three) gave them a starting place to spot some overarching trends and start building their first persona.

Build your user persona today 🔥

A simple user persona example

This is an example of the simple persona Smallpdfcame up with on the back of their research:

Note that this information would have been impossible to come by simply by looking at Google Analytics or making assumptions about how people use a product. Instead they've usedwebsite feedbackto their advantage.

So, here’s a top-level run-down of how they got to it, before I go and show you exactly how you can do it yourself in the next section.

1. They set up a short on-page survey

This step was the easiest.Smallpdf could have sent long surveys to their customers, spent days interviewing them, or even hired an expensivemarket researchcompany. Instead, they used theHotjar Survey toolto create a 5-question poll that ran on their homepage for a couple of weeks, until it reached 1,000 answers:

One of the 5 survey questions Smallpdf asked their users

💡 We've created a pre-built user persona survey template that you can use to start collecting data, just like Smallpdf did.

2. They analyzed the data

When you askopen-ended questions, you receive mountains of qualitative data. That was the case for Smallpdf, who stopped the survey after getting 1,000 replies.

Now, 1,000 replies area lotif you have to go through them one by one manually. Luckily, there are tricks and shortcuts for it (I’ll show you below), but the point is that spending time analyzing the data allowed Smallpdfto come up with a clearer picture of their users. Which, in turn, meant that…

3. They drew conclusions

Thanks to the demographic question (What is your job title?), Smallpdf learned that students, teachers, designers, administrators, lawyers, medical professionals, and real estate agents made their list of most common users.

Through the goal questions (What are you using Smallpdf for right now? What kind of documents do you process with Smallpdf?), they saw how each group used the tool for largely different purposes, which they needed to address.

And with the barrier question (What’s a task you wanted to complete with Smallpdf, but couldn’t?), they now also had a clear picture of what they needed to fix and what features they could add to pre-empt user errors.

Thiswas a great launchpad for a more in-depth investigation into the needs of these particular user types; the team then used this information to launch a round of in-field research, and eventually one of their user personas broke down like this:

• Who are they? Administrative Assistants

• What is their main goal? Creating Word documents from a scanned, hard-copy document or a PDF where the source file was lost

  (Video) About personas and how to create them

• What is their main barrier to achieving it? Converting a scanned PDF doc to a word file

What else did they learn about administrators?

What happened next?

Smallpdf powered up theirPDF to Word toolwith optical character recognition technology, so their users could extract text from any PDF or image. They also added localization packages in several common languages, specifically so that administrators around the world could reproduce scanned documents accurately.

Eventually,the changes they put in place as a result of these personas increased the success rate of their tool by an impressive 75%; their NPS also increased slightly.

They also left a Hotjar widgetat the side of the page so users could freely report any annoyances or issues. This widget often functions as Smallpdf's safety check system: if they receive a lot of poor feedback, with or without explanation, they test the tool a second time, more rigorously, and reach out to users for more information.

How to create a persona: 4 steps

Now that you’ve seen the top-level summary of how Smallpdf did it, let me show you the step-by-step process you can follow to do it yourself. There are 4 steps in total:

1. Choose questions for your survey

2. Set up a survey on a popular page

3. Analyze your data

4. Build your persona

Step 1: choose 3 questions for your survey

Here are three things you need to identify to get started building a persona: a key demographic, a key goal, and a key concern or barrier.

Your first survey doesn’t have to be perfect; it just needs to get you closer to understanding your customers by asking them three open-ended questions:

1. Describe yourself in one sentence, e.g. “I am a 30-year old marketer based in Dublin who enjoys writing articles about user personas.”

2. What is your main goal for using this website/product?

3. What, if anything, is preventing you from doing it?

Good questions will give you a sense of how your customers use your product or service, what problems are deal breakers, which features matter to them, etc.You can borrow the ones Smallpdf used and tweak them depending on your business; or you can use our user persona survey template to get started right away.

Just be sure to limit this particular survey to three questions, so your users won’t get bored and drop off before finishing.

Step 2: set up a survey on your most visited page

Setting up and placing a survey on your most visited page will only take a few minutes. Here is how Smallpdf did it using Hotjar Surveys (note: you cansign up to Hotjar for freeto give this whole process a try yourself).

1 - Create a new survey

Click on ‘Surveys’ in the sidebar menu, then ‘New Survey’:

2 - Name your survey

We’ll call ours ‘Homepage persona’, but you can choose whatever name you like:

3 - Set it to appear on the homepage

• Select which devices you’ll show the survey on

• Show the survey on your homepage by selecting the ‘On pages I specify’ option and writing your homepage URL in the dedicated space:

• Select the percentage of visitors that will be shown this survey (pick 100% if you want to get results quicker, or a lower number if you worry that you might disrupt the experience):

4 - Add the questions

• For question 1 (demographic):

  • Select ‘Long text answer’ as your question type

  • Write your question in the ‘Type your question here…’ field:

• For question 2 (goal):

  • Click ‘Add Question’

  • Select ‘Long text answer’ as the question type

  • Write your question:

• For question 3 (barrier):

  • Click ‘Add Question’

  • Select: ‘Long text answer’ as the question type

  • Write your question:

• Personalize the thank you message

✏️ NOTE: If you want to match a survey response to a HotjarSession Recordingto see the exact experience the customer had, make sure to check the box labeled ‘Ask respondents to give their consent to connect their feedback to data stored about them.’

5 - Set the appearance

Set the language, position, background color (make sure to match your site’s color scheme), and theme.

6 - Set the behavior to launch immediately after the page loads

7 - Activate!

Set the status to ‘Active’ and you’re all set!

Okay, but—what does the data look like?As your users start filling in the poll, all the individual answers will be visible in the Hotjar dashboard. It will look a bit like this:

This is great for keeping an eye on how things are going while the poll is active; once you’re ready to pause and analyze the results, you’ll want to export all the data in .csv or .xlsx format. And you’ll have a button to do that at the top of your dashboard 😉

Step 3: analyze the data

Your goal is to identify one or two user personas to focus on, so you can start improving their experience today. After you have collected enough answers, you will have a spreadsheet full of data to help you do that.

Analyzing data-heavy documents like this one can be daunting, so I’ve created auser persona analysis templateyou can copy and re-use to make the process faster.

User persona analysis template

Simply follow these instructions:

• Open this article where I explain a5-step method to analyze open-ended questions

• Use the user persona templateand go through steps 1-4 of the article above

• Instead of analyzing the three questions individually as the article suggests, analyze them together so you can spot patterns faster

Once you’re done, you’ll have your main demographics, goals, and barriers clearly organized on the spreadsheet.

Next:start by looking at the goals and see whether there’s one that stands out, with 50% of answers or more. If that’s the case, look at the demographics associated with the goal: if you also see a pattern with 50%+ answers with the same demographic, then you have your first user persona.

If you don’t have a clear goal or a clear demographic that stand out, consider arranging them further:

Step 4: build your persona

Based on the data you analyze, create one simple user persona that represents the largest chunk of your user base, and identifies a:

• Key demographic

• Key goal

• Key concern/barrier to purchase

You can use this information to fill inthe user persona templatebelow. Again, I created a template that you can just copy and start using immediately:

ASIMPLE USER PERSONA TEMPLATEYOU CAN USE

And that’s it! Go ahead and create a survey, work with the data you can gather right now, and trust that any information is better than no information.

As you grow, you will (hopefully) have the resources to conduct more in-depth research. And, however you choose to approach that research, creating these simple personas is a good first step.

5 terrific tips for creating user personas

When done properly, user personas are immensely useful to help you grow and improve your business. Here are five final tips to help you get started and create personas that work for you:

1. Don’t confuse demographic and persona

Some of the persona examples you see online paint quite vivid, clear pictures of a user demographic… and then stop right there.

A useful persona is always more than an age and a job title, because it helps you understand the motivations, fears, and concerns of your ideal customer and market.Knowing that one of your personas is in their mid-30s and shops online twice a week is useless if you don’t know what is stopping them from buying things on your website today.

2. Start small, expand after

There are hundreds of eye-catching and really in-depth persona templates out there that you can fill in. It’s tempting, but when you’re just getting started doing persona work, and/or want to get results fast, the three attributes we mentioned—a demographic, their main goal, and a major barrier stopping them—and a simple one-page template are more than enough.

3. Don’t just ‘come up’ with personas: base them on real people

It’s also tempting to just ‘come up’ with user personas based on your/your colleagues/your boss’ understanding of your market.

Don’t!

Proper user personas should not be based on fictional user stories your company is inventing. Avoid your own bias by asking simple questions to your real user base.

4. Talk to your users in person, if you can

Setting a simple survey like we showed you in this article is a fast/great start to do excellent persona work. If/when you feel the need to build your case further and expand on what you’ve built, nothing beats talking with a few of your real visitors and customers in person (or via video chat!).

Consider adding a question at the end of your survey asking to share their contact details if they’re happy to be contacted and talk further.

5. Keep an open mind

This is a consequence of the previous two points. You might be surprised by the answers you’re getting and tempted to steer away from them to follow your internal company narrative.

Again: don’t!

The first rule of marketing, as Mark Ritson puts it, is thatyou’re not the customer. Remember this, and let customer insights guide you.

Build your user persona today 🔥

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