How do you choose the right level of detail for UX personas?

Long personas often fail to capture the attention of stakeholders and the design team, limiting the integration of insights. Here is a 6-step method to make awesome quick personas: 1. Start with a concise 1-page document for each persona. 2. Give a memorable name with a relatable picture for each persona, increasing retention and making readers visualize the persona's characteristics. 3. Define the purpose of the Persona project and include only the most relevant Persona attributes for the current project's scope. 4. You don't always need extensive data to create personas - hypotheses, online research, and stakeholder knowledge are a great starting point. 5. Highlight the actionable roadmap based on the Persona report. All the best!!

Here's what has helped me understand the purpose of design and product: 1: Define the level of detail you should use in your UX 2: Ask yourself this question – will these details help me achieve my overall goal? 3: Can I name every persona I have and can I explain in a short sentence who he/she is and what his/her goals are? 4: Prioritize. You can save yourself buckets of time and effort by identifying some personas at a very high level while focusing on only one or two in-depth.

When I'm thinking of personas, I have to consider each type of person in my target audience group. You'll have users with different goals in mind. So from my experience, the best strategy for myself has always been to create a persona with a goal and a problem, and then figure out how that problem can be solved.

Talking of user personas is an exciting topic. My design process starts with market research. But keeping it to design, as a designer then, you should start by creating these personas for all the use cases you have in your product(s). By doing this we are better guided throught our design process sticking to the user's perspective = our persona(s)

I think from research point of view the purpose of personas is to create reliable and realistic representations of key audience segments for reference. These representations should be based on qualitative and some quantitative user research and analytics. Its vital to remember, The personas are only as good as the research behind them.

Using demographics should not be the norm. It causes bias and doesn't help with design decisions. This is from research done by Indi Young. Keeping to motivations, behaviors, goals, and attitudes is much more useful.

When creating UX personas, it's crucial to use the right data to ensure accuracy and relevance. Gather data from user research, surveys, and analytics that directly reflect the behaviours, needs, and goals of your target audience, allowing you to construct personas that genuinely represent the user base and inform effective design decisions.

In my experience, doing lean research in technical pre-sales for large enterprises through a pilot / mvp / proof of concept can benefit from what we call "sponsor users" joining us in collaborative discovery workshops as we seek to understand the persona and get "just enough" of the right data to test and prove value for executives evaluating a solution. A sponsor user is at least one person who represents the end user or knows them best. Maybe this goes against the grain for some in UX design, but it has helped us avoid building the wrong thing for 2-4 week MVPs. If you work on a truly agile team, you can always iterate. Also, a sponsor user gives just enough insight to make stakeholders realize the value of UX.

I think its very contextual, if you're in a process of creating a persona for consumer goods related product/business then its important to know the demographics, therefore its good to use researched qualitative data, such as interviews, observations, or user testing, to explore the motivations, emotions, and behaviors of your users.

When it comes to creating UX personas, nailing the perfect level of detail is like mixing a killer cocktail—totally about using data in a smart way. Picture this: you're working on a food delivery app. Crunching numbers from user stats and surveys might spill the beans that busy young professionals are your prime customers. Now, toss in some spicy qualitative data, snagged from cozy chats with these users. You might uncover their craving for quick, healthy bites that don't tie them to the stove. And don't forget to sprinkle in industry gossip, like food trend articles. You might catch wind of a skyrocketing interest in plant-based eats. Mix these data flavors, and your personas will be sizzling with real-life cravings, desires, and trends.

Something to think about is creating modular persona formats. This way you can put together a template for each stage of the process that only shows the important information at that phase of the project.

Some of the key attribute to have in persona is their demographies, accessibility, key challenges & aspirations towards the subject. The clear it is defined the clearer it becomes for designers to design or to build.

Once again, focus on motivations, goals, pain points, attitudes, and behaviors, not demographics. A name help for memory and a profile photo creates an empathetic response, but don't use those as a checklist of items. A Personas job is to help put stakeholders and designers in the shoes of people who might or might not use the product or service. What are they feeling and what do they need?

We need to differentiate between different types of personas (buying personas, user personas, etc.). If its the first time we are doing personas, as a bare minimum MVP persona (focus on the overarching jobs to be done/JTBD for a given persona, key tasks (what matters to users), context (influencers/constraints), struggles (hassles/pain points) and feelings/emotions. Remember the No.1 goal of personas is to help your teams better empathize with users and help your business understand the ideal customer... The deeper the insights, the better you can empathize with and get to know your customers. Scenarios and story telling can be really helpful here

A persona is a living and concentrated image of users: their motives, behavior, and goals. Stock photos of "businessmen", "deep" quotes from Facebook groups, witty names, marketing buzzwords, and labels (brands, interest, income, marital status) - all this usually does not help to create a good service or product. Personas are not marketing segments, but generalized patterns of consumer behavior. Take away all the tinsel — and then you can focus on what's most important.

Including background knowledge can be helpful as well, such as familiarity with other tools or software, how goals are accomplished now, events that caused a heightened emotional response during interviews.

I think a summary quote or verbatim speaks louder and adds great value on top of other attributes. This can be categorised under must have component of a persona.

Tell the story. History is often forgotten, but it explains the prerequisites and environment of a person. Without a story, a persona loses expressiveness and realism, that is, it turns into an abstraction for the team. People are not robots, our behavior is influenced by many circumstances, not necessarily related to each other. A story tells the reasons why your product or service is being used and the context. A common story format is “a day in the life of a character”, but of course, you can choose a different period and focus.

A good way to think about the structure of your personas is that you should be able to get something from them at 3 different distances. 1. Across the room Understand who they are and what is important to them 2. At arms length Walking down the line of personas on the wall, you should be able to discuss the differences and start to get into the needs and pain points. 3. On screen of close up Also add the detail where required so that anyone using them can understand the why for each of the big learnings for each data point.

Make your UX personas more interesting by using ideas from different ways of thinking like MBTI, Jungian Archetypes, how people think, and what they're good at, to give them special qualities that users can connect with.

You need to choose the right level of detail for user personas: 1: Figure out the gap in your existing personas 2: Nail down the role of the persona you want to build and why you're creating it 3: Ask your team for a list of things that should be in your persona, then ask again. Is the list getting shorter? 4: Be specific about how users behave and why they do so, leave out generic nouns. Use full sentences with all necessary clauses to avoid misinterpretation 5: From a product manager perspective give 3 ways you can validate and/or refine your current personas.

Ideally, a persona is not a static object. You should be constantly engaging with your users and learning new things as you do this. Every time a new piece of information is found it should be rolled into the content and the update shared and highlighted with the wider team. If something previously understood is no longer true or relevant, the impact needs to be validated with any previous design decisions.

From my point of view persona is an evolving character, it grows along with the product or design. Validation is important, it helps in eliminating biases also help in identifying ant shortcomings.

Keep Personas updated regularly. Create a rolling research program. Have Personas easily accessible to anyone at the company. Printing them out can make them seem like static documents. Use a wiki or knowledge management system to keep data fresh.

You could get started with assumption Personas and then validate/refine with real-life primary and secondary user research. There is a special technique used for adding an extra layer of detail about personas... It is called an Empathy Map (what personas see/hear, say, think, feel and do with respect to a particular experience) as such it is highly specific to a given or select experience of the overall customer/user journey.

As mentioned by Julia (DeBari), personas are an ongoing effort. Beyond using the right data to build them, the key factor is their being ACTIONABLE. Personas that don't help support and drive actionability are nothing more than an empty activity. Make sure that the information included in your personas are always accurate, meaningful, and... actionable

Creating Personas is an ongoing effort, not a one and done effort. Keep people apprised of the differences between Design Personas and Marketing Personas. Don't conflate the two or try to combine them.

Designing real products for real people will push you to become more thoughtful and intentional in your design decisions, and working with a team will shape your design process.

Only the most advanced companies actually realize that it is possible to change user behavior by changing underlying user perceptions, beliefs, thoughts and feelings. There is an ideal state of our personas which can be defined/managed as a separate goal. You could also track KPIs by personas (CAC, CLTV, share of spend/wallet, profit, etc.). If you are short on time & resources, you could start with assumption personas or synthetic personas generated by AI (ChatGPT).

Don't get carried away describing every detail of a persona. Rather, focus on just one or two important details that influence behavior. Try and find a way to validate the core opinions and thoughts behind the persona with customers and coworkers. Share your assumptions about a user's goals when they begin an interaction with your product and ask for feedback.