Personas are a practical tool for prioritizing content and functionality. They are fictional characters based on an identified audience or user type. Personas typically include a hypothetical person’s name, key demographic characteristics, motivations, anxieties, and the tasks they need to complete about a website, application, or service. They serve as an encapsulation of your understanding of the intended audience.
We create personas with information gathered from user and stakeholder interviews. As a result of these activities, we can identify the most important functionality an audience needs. These personas will aid in making design decisions and build empathy while maintaining objectivity. They can also serve as the basis for user testing to validate the website.
Personas are not intended to capture all the site’s needs or functionality. Rather, they serve as an understanding of the site’s most important priorities. Behavioral personas primarily describe target audiences grouped by behaviors rather than demographic traits. In this context, a persona represents a group of consumers rather than a single entity with similar thinking and behavior about a specific service. The basic rationale for anyone while interacting with a product or service and what users hope to get out of this interaction are often captured by creating behavioral personas.