How to Build a User Persona for your App

Creating an app perfectly tailored to users’ requirements is a challenge that many organizations face to conquer. You need a clear understanding to empathize with your target audience. The app should resonate with their needs instead of just focusing on the development of the product for yourself. In order to understand who your customers are, you require user personas. User personas are the best way to get your users engaged in the app. In this article, we will understand about user personas in detail and how you can build them for your app successfully. 

What is a User Persona?

User Personas are fictional characters that you create based on your target research to represent different types of users. They are built using user behavior, interests, demographics, designation, and several other related identifiers. 

Now you must be wondering- Why do we exactly need user personas? 

In order to build exceptional products, you require a deep understanding of your customers. User Personas make the whole process of designing the product easy for both product and development teams. All you need is to be mindful throughout the whole process of designing user personas that resemble the target audience you aim to target. 

How to Create User Personas?

Step1: Do Thorough Research on Your Target Market 

The first and foremost step in creating a user persona is to start good user research to identify the key characteristics and traits of your target audience. Instead of making predefined assumptions, it’s important to study the targeted demographic and get clarity on their pain points, related problems, and focus on how your product can help them solve those problems. 

Right from finding answers to questions such as ‘Who are your potential users?’, ‘How your product will benefit your users?’ and so on. You need to find out ways to gather customer feedback on similar apps along with monitoring your competitor’s presence on all social media platforms. Following this strategic approach will make things clear for you in order to fulfil all the parameters that meets the criteria for successful product development.  

Step 2: Analyze Your Data to Understand Customer Objective 

Once you’re done with the research and have enough data in your hand, it’s time to conduct brief analysis of the data and understand customer goals. You need to figure out what will make them download your app and what role will it play in their day-to-day life. 

For example: Let’s suppose you’re building an app belonging to the health and fitness category. One of the objectives that will help users engage with your app is to track activities belonging to their health and fitness. Offering customized diet plans and offering related features based on specific person’s persona will trigger them to install your app eventually helping them in achieving their goals. Solving the purpose of user’s health related concerns will ensure successful engagement of the app. Thus, leading to successful development of the product. 

Step 3: Get Clarity on User Challenges 

Once you have understood the customer’s objective, it’s the phase where you need to get clarity on the user’s challenges with related to your app. This will help you gather genuine feedback from customers and understand their expectations. By implementing this step, users will help you solve app related issues such as app interface concerns, login issues and so on. Also, identifying user challenges is a process that requires continuous monitoring and be able to provide your users with the best possible solutions in specific timeframe. 

Step 4: Build the User Persona 

This is the step where it all will seem worth it. You can use all the information you collected to build different types of user personas for multiple users. Each persona should consist of unique name and requires mapping to the relevant information belonging to them. Start framing your user persona by adding demographic information such as age, designation, gender etc. After that you need to focus on mentioning the pain points, interests belong to specific user. In fact, using realistic human images and tools such as Miro to create user personas will make them more realistic and help you understand the buyer’s journey with more ease. Thus, continuous feedback on personas in order to meet user expectations will ease the pain of product development for you. 

Conclusion

The process of app development comes with its own set of challenges but building user personas will set the right foundation for your product. With detailed market research, you will be able to connect with your customers on a broader level understanding their emotions and interests in a more enhanced way. Also, creating user personas as per your competitor’s analysis will help you study real life observations of customers and their pain points to create successful product.