Defining a Persona

After some small research I realized it really depends on your own goals – what exactly you want to know about the user. Below are some of my thoughts how to define a persona, but they are rather “recommendations” than a solid template:

Defining a Persona

A persona represents a group of users who exhibit similar behavioral patterns in their use of technology or products, customer service preferences, lifestyle choices, and the like.

A persona details should list relevant to your business [or to your software] items.  One of the ways defining them is to conduct users interviews on the customer side (among potential end users), and starting from 30 interviews we can create a definition of our persona. Other thought how it can be done is through anonymous online surveys.

There are some details we may find about a persona, split on two main categories:

1. Personal Profile

1.     Age range (or broader: demographics)
2.     Location (or broader: cultural background)
3.     General likes/dislikes (list at least several items for each)
4.     Typical day off-work: Common everyday tasks and computer usage (describe)


2. Professional Expertise (these are still very general items. We may ask people to answer very specific question)

1.     Goals/needs
2.     Typical work day: Common everyday tasks, timing, and software usage
3.     [Type of industry of your business] software experience (describe: what, why, how, how long, likes/dislikes)
5.     Experience with a specific software of your interest (what product, why, how many years, likes/dislikes)
6.     Experience of use of operation system (MS Windows, version, years)
7.     MS Office experience

So, basically we should have a list of questions to ask users. 

After asking certain amount of people we can build a bigger picture, i.e. a persona.


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