Persona (user experience)

A persona (also user persona, user personality, customer persona, buyer persona) in user-centered design and marketing is a personalized fictional character created to represent a user type that might use a site, brand, or product in a similar way.^[1] Personas represent the similarities of consumer groups or segments. They are based on demographic and behavioural personal information collected from users, qualitative interviews, and participant observation. Personas are one of the outcomes of market segmentation,^[2] where marketers use the results of statistical analysis and qualitative observations to draw profiles, giving them names and personalities to paint a picture of a person that could exist in real life. The term persona is used widely in online and technology applications as well as in advertising, where other terms such as pen portraits may also be used.

Personas are useful in considering the goals, desires, and limitations of brand buyers and users in order to help to guide decisions about a service, product or interaction space such as features, interactions, and visual design of a website. Personas may be used as a tool during the user-centered design process for designing software. They can introduce interaction design principles to things like industrial design and online marketing.

A user persona is a representation of the goals and behavior of a hypothesized group of users. In most cases, personas are synthesized from data collected from interviews or surveys with users.^[3] They are captured in short page descriptions that include behavioral patterns, goals, skills, attitudes, with a few fictional personal details to make the persona a realistic character. In addition to Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), personas are also widely used in sales, advertising, marketing and system design.^[4] Personas provide common behaviors, outlooks, and potential objections of people matching a given persona.