A user persona is a representation of the goals, challenges, and behaviors of a hypothesized subset of users. Personas are informed by research, typically through the user interview process at the beginning of a project. Personas are then continuously refined based on actual user behaviors throughout the user testing phase.

The ultimate goal of a persona is to generate empathy for potential users. The personas make the design thinking process more personal, allowing the UX designer to see the user experience from the POV of users. This will also help in telling a story about users to other stakeholders and in presenting designs to developers.

On smaller projects there may be just one user persona created. On larger projects there may be several user personas. When that is the case, it is helpful to create a primary persona to represent the user who has the greatest impact on the UX design.

The guidelines on creating a persona provided in my CareerFoundry course are helpful. CareerFoundry suggests the following when creating a user persona: 

• Name and face. Give your persona a name and face. You can either sketch out a character or find a convincing photograph.
• Demographic information. Outline your persona’s location, age range, education, ethnicity, family status, and job titles.
• Needs and goals. Identify goals and tasks your persona will want to achieve using your product or service.
• Behaviors. Take notes on your persona’s current behaviors or feelings towards your product, service, or industry.
• Quotes. Come up with relevant quotes that sum up your persona’s relationship with your product, service, or industry.

Once a persona has been created, the next step is to tell a user story from the perspective of the persona. User stories allow a UX designer to focus on important functions and solutions from a specific persona’s perspective.

The process includes crafting a Problem Statement and Hypothesis Statement on how the UX design is going to address the problem. A Problem Statement simply lets the UX designer focus on a problem the UX design is trying to solve for the user. The Hypothesis Statement is an initial proposal for how the UX design is going to solve the problem from the perspective of the persona.

Following is an example of a persona that I created for my CareerFoundry Intro to UX Design course.