User Personas
Learn how to use personas to help remember who you are making a website for as you work on a site rebuild.
Nielsen Norman Group describes a persona as a “a fictional, yet realistic, description of a typical or target user of the product. A persona is an archetype instead of an actual living human, but personas should be described as if they were real people.”
Creating personas can help your team remember who they are making the website for — real people with real goals.
Personas are most helpful when they are based on user research.
Example Persona
For a Texas A&M website, you might have several personas, including a persona to represent the archetype of a prospective student. When we were redesigning www.tamu.edu in 2022, we created personas for several archetypes, including several types of prospective students.
One of these personas was Raegan, a 17-year-old high school student in his junior year. Raegan is social and eager, and is planning to be a third-generation Fightin’ Texas Aggie. He can’t wait to get his Aggie Ring and join the Aggie Network – he believes developing a strong network will increase job and social opportunities post-graduation. Raegan gets information about Texas A&M from his family and by keeping up with our athletics programs, but looks for details about applications and current opportunities through websites. Raegan’s biggest challenges are feeling pressure from his family, a tendency to overcommit, and navigating the application process because he is not in the top 10% for automatic acceptance.
As you can see, a persona involves a lot of personal details that help flesh out an archetype to give specific desires a real person might have. Creating personas can help you empathize with your different audience segments, leading toward choices that are ultimately more helpful to your target audience.
Using a Persona
Putting a persona in practice effectively means using that persona to help guide decision making. You may use your personas to help identify content needs, navigation labels, where to place key calls to action and more.
In the example above, we would use Raegan’s persona to help make sure application information was easily discoverable.