Tools Used in This Recipe
A free, open source tool to generate random user profile data.
An overview of best practices and examples of user personas, from Justinmind. Site links to a free Powerpoint-based persona template.
Build user personas for customer research, user experience design, or other purposes. You will be prompted to provide contact information to Hubspot in order to access the finished personas.
What are personas?
A user persona is a representation of a group of your customers. They use falsified names, stock photos, and other attributes to help you and your team build a connection to the customer group. User personas can be helpful if you are stuck thinking about people to interview for customer research, and they are extremely helpful when building marketing campaigns and product experience design.
You should target one persona for each significant portion of your user base. What constitutes significant will depend on your product, but as a rule your personas should cover 80% of your potential paying users. To get started, think about the attributes of each potential customer group and try to cluster them. Some examples of attributes are:
- Pain Points / Motivations
- Goals
- Influences
- Demographics (only if they matter) such as:
- Age
- Gender
- Income level
- Education
- Device usage (mobile, tablet, desktop, etc)
It's very likely that you will develop many personas and decide to combine a few that are actually similar, and that's okay
After you have developed the persona, it's helpful to assign a photo to it (you can use one from RandomUser.me to make it simple). Sometimes it's helpful to generate a short bio.
Generate a persona with Hubspot Make My Persona
To save you some work generating personas, Hubspot has built a free tool to assist you in the process. To start, navigate to their Make My Persona site. There is some helpful guidance on that page about what personas are and how to build them, but let's get started by clicking Build My Persona.
The first step is to select a name and an avatar (note that for advanced users there is also an option to skip the walkthrough mode and just build a persona). By convention personas combine a first name and a keyword that references the group they represent. If you were building a tool to support senior executives in large companies, something like Boardroom Belinda might work. You'll also want the avatar to roughly match the demographics of the segment, if applicable.
Next the tool asks you to select an age and education level. Unfortunately you can't skip options that aren't relevant, but a sensible default isn't bad to include.
Next the tool gives you a chance to select the persona's industry and size of organization.
The next steps are optional and several are free-text. These can help you think about motivations, goals, and pain points for this customer segment.
Once you are done, you'll be prompted to provide contact information (Hubspot uses this tool for generating leads). After entering any information you wish you'll get a nicely-formatted user persona. If there are any custom questions or information you want to include, you can use the Add Section function on this page to do so. If you have a Hubspot account you can save this to edit later, and you can download it as a PDF if you prefer.
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