Developing User Persona’s for your web project

When you first set out to build a new website it’s important to understand who is going to be using the site, why they want to interact with it and what they aim to achieve. Building this profile of the different people (persona’s) that use the site will help ensure the user experience, conten and any specific action tasks will be built with them in mind.

By building a site in this way it will ensure its built with the customer in mind and should lead to a more successful end product. Through asking a series of questions it’s possible to start to build this picture including simple things such as age, gender, job profile (if B2B) as well more in-depth topics looking at why they have come to the site and what could get in the way of them achieving their goals.

Ten key points to creating user persona’s for your website:

1. Look at your current customer data and any insight it tells you
2. Understand what your typical web users or clients look like
3. Define what their demographics are (age / gender etc)
4. Try and understand a bit more about what their motivations are
5. Think about why they do business with you
6. Build out a profile that paints a picture of who they are
7. Match this profile with the data you have on your customers to sense check
8. Map this against what users do on your site and how they interact with its content
9. Continue to refine and hone this on a regular basis
10. Track the success of how the site performs against these personas

Gooey have worked with a range of different agencies to help build the best websites for their clients over the years and to aide the briefing process we’ve also created some handy templates to use with your client. Below you can find a User Persona Template we’ve created to help with your planning and any workshops you plan to host.

Feel free to download the template by filling in the below form, and we’ll be happy to give you any guidance needed on how to use this with your client. This should aide the briefing process for the project and ensure it’s a success when it comes to the finished offering.