Persona generators are the building blocks of any company trying to get traffic to its website – organically or via ads. In this article, we will tell you what a user persona is and what it’s important, show you some examples of user personas, and list nine persona generators you can use. Let’s dive in!
What is User Persona, and Why is it Important?
A User Persona helps marketers or businesses identify all characteristics of their target customers. Doing so allows them to create or modify their product or service to better suit their buyers. Although these personas are fabricated, they represent real people with identical backgrounds, demography, challenges, and goals. A user persona also compiles all that information to communicate it in an easy and understandable manner. User personas are not just created based on what the company thinks its ideal customer is. Instead, they are created by researching real-world data and statistics provided by actual research.
Why Do You Need a User Persona?
Whether you’re making AI software for B2B companies or manufacturing construction equipment, you need a User persona. It will guide you in making a successful product by helping you understand who will use it and how they will use it. Here’s a list of questions that a user persona can answer for you:
Who will use your product?What are the current lifestyle and behavior patterns of your customer?The challenges or problems your customers faceThe needs and goals of your customerHow can you help them fulfill their needs and goals?
Getting clear answers to these questions will give you an accurate visualization of things you need to address with your product. This also allows your product team and designers to keep the user types in consideration while designing and developing the product. Your team can take specific paths and actions that are chosen while keeping the user in mind. In hindsight, a good persona will guide you towards building a final product that solves a problem, is desirable, and is useful.
Benefits of User Personas
We just discussed why you need user personas. Now, let’s discuss their actual uses and tangible benefits.
Create a Product for a Highly Specific Audience
When you know your target user, you can create a product specific to them and their needs. It also provides direction to designers and developers to shape the strategy and execution. This brings the entire team on one page without a difference of opinion to influence the outcomes.
Build Empathy Towards the User
When a designer empathizes with the user, they can genuinely make better products that your customers need. It creates a strong understanding of why exactly they need the product and the impact it could make on a customer’s day-to-day life. Designers also start viewing the product from the user’s perspective and take actions that the user might want them to take.
Get an Excellent Final Product
As the designers and developers strategize and implement the product with the user persona in mind, they will provide a good outcome. The product will be directly aligned with the user’s goals and needs while also making it relevant enough to be a long-term solution.
Aids in Product Positioning and Marketing
Selling a product and creating a product are two different things. However, both of them benefit from a strong user persona. Understanding your ideal customer not only allows you to create a product they will use but also helps you reach out to them to sell it.
Examples of User Persona
To better understand user persona creation, here are a few examples of scenarios and suitable user personas.
User Persona for an E-learning App
In this example, the company’s main product is an E-learning App. The target customers for this service are teachers, schools, and parents. To make the best app for the target customers, the company needs to understand who they are. Here’s the user persona of a teacher who can benefit from the e-learning app By identifying his challenges, the product can be made to address those problems and give the user a great product. In this case, Rahim’s biggest challenge is working with students who consistently perform poorly. So, the developers can include content like practice tests, chapter-wise quizzes, etc., to address the challenge. Additionally, the goal of Rahim is to make his students grasp all of the important lessons and make them better students. To help him achieve this goal, the product designer can include content like animated videos, rhymes, or anything that makes any chapter easy to learn.
User Persona for a Project Management Software Company
In this example, the company’s main product is a project management tool for large organizations and teams. The target customers for this service are CEOs, directors, and managers of large corporations and businesses. Here’s the user persona of a Marketing Director who can benefit from the project management tool. Some of the biggest challenges for Jim are – not meeting deadlines and a lack of coordination in his department. By understanding this, the project management tool can be made to fix these issues. The developers can add features like time-tracking, project boards, and communication mediums to the tool. Doing so might help fix the issues Jim’s facing. Here are some of the best persona generators you can try.
Hubspot – Make My Persona
Hubspot is one of the most popular platforms for a variety of marketing tools. Make My Persona by Hubspot is a free and extremely easy-to-use persona generator.
Features of Make My Persona by Hubspot
The tool’s designed for anyone to use, making it extremely user-friendly and easy to useYou can create a user persona template in just a few minutesMake My Persona also allows you to add custom fields that you may need to addCustomizable design with different color schemes, pre-made user avatars, and the ability to reorganize the fields
Make My Persona by Hubspot doesn’t have any unnecessary steps or features that you don’t need. You can start creating a user persona without any prior knowledge of doing so and still get the job done.
Adobe Express
Previously known as Adobe Spark, Adobe Express isn’t primarily a User Persona Generator but has free user persona templates you can use. It is actually a designing tool created to be used on a browser for making simple designs.
Features of Adobe Express
A huge library of user persona templates and ready-made designs for you to tryEasy integration with other Adobe Suite apps like Photoshop, Illustrator, etc. for a smooth workflowCreate a user persona design from scratch using plenty of tools to get the right design elementsA highly collaborative tool that supports sharing the templates or designs with team members or anyone else for making changes
Adobe Express is one of the best design tools for creating a user persona. If you are experienced in making user personas, you can create your own design according to your needs. On the other hand, total beginners can just pick one template and change the field data to fit their user persona.
UXPressia
UXPressia is a highly comprehensive user persona generator that has almost all the features you could ask for. Marketers can design these personas online with ease and also go for in-depth descriptions and fields.
Features of UXPressia
Access to a wide range of existing fields of information or create new ones depending upon your needs.Add a persona type by choosing 1 out of 4 options and add market size by percentage.Create multiple user personas and differentiate between the two of them to make the most informed decisionsName and photo generator for easy designing without the need to look for stock imagesAdd custom sliders and icons in your information fields to make it more creative.Built-in presentation modeIntegrate data with embed codes in your personasLive collaboration with your team
UXPressia is an excellent tool for those who are looking to create the most comprehensive user personas with unique yet easy designs. You can access the basic persona generator for free, but you also have the option to upgrade to premium versions to access all features.
Delve AI
Delve AI is a unique buyer persona generator that uses the data from your Google Analytics to automatically create one or more user personas for your company/product.
Features of Delve AI
Delve is an AI-based user persona generator, and you don’t need to fill in any information yourself.Create user personas based on your Google Analytics data for highly accurate resultsYou can also conduct competitive research relative to your user personasGet accurate answers and data like behavioral patterns, demography, etc.
Although Delve AI is an amazing and easy user persona generator, it still lacks a few features. For instance, you can’t add any information to the personas or create different fields for certain information. Regardless, it’s a great tool that saves a lot of time creating user personas by yourself. It also helps you look at Google Analytics data a little differently.
UserForge
UserForge is one of the oldest user persona generators on this list. It’s a great tool at what it needs to be and does the job of creating user persona templates exactly as you’d want from it.
Features of UserForge
Create unique and modern designs for your user persona templateSimple interface with frequent updates to add more features and keep the tool bug-freeAdd more depth to your personas with story maps and visuals to better connect with the user’s experienceBig integrated image library and over 1000+ icons to choose fromCollaborate with your team and connect UserForge with JIRA software for better project management
UserForge user persona templates are more like mini-blogs and offer in-depth personas to understand the users better. You can use UserForge with a free trial or buy it from different versions.
SEMRush Persona
SEMRush is an extremely easy and basic user persona generator. Start with a polaroid image and create a finished user persona within minutes. Despite being a basic and simple tool, you can fulfill all your needs with their user persona templates.
Features of SEMRush Persona
Easy to use and has highly customizable templatesAdd and remove content fields as per your liking and needsRearrange information and add different colors to different blocks to display levels of importanceExplainers and notes for all fields that explain what it means, making it a great beginner-friendly tool
SEMRush lacks a few essential features like being able to upload personal images and choosing the user name. However, the tool does a great job at explaining all the fields to beginners and makes it easy to create user personas for free.
Xtensio
Create highly creative and descriptive user personas with Xtensio for free. Xtensio allows you to access some of the best user persona templates and designs with extensive information fields.
Features of Xtensio
Skim through 100+ templates and examples to get inspiration Create user personas with the help of an exhaustive tool containing all of the important design featuresReal-time collaboration with your teamCustom sliders and fields like traits, motivations, skills, etc.Choose your own image and name for the user personaAdd and rearrange different sections as desired
Xtensio enables you to get stunning designs for your buyer persona without you having to be a designer. It’s also completely free forever. So, you can create as many projects as you want.
Samply
Samply allows you to create a user persona template from scratch or choose an existing one with great customization. It’s a paid tool, but you can get the free trial to start experimenting with your user personas.
Features of Samply
Highly customizable templates which you can modify using images, text, and elementsFocuses more on the basis rather than taking unnecessary customization options Beginner-friendly process and UI with drag and drop style designing or simply changing the content of a ready-made templateYou can export the user persona in PDF files very easily or duplicate it
The tool makes user persona generation extremely easy. However, the lack of more attractive designs makes it a ‘not so aesthetically pleasing’ tool. Nevertheless, you can get Samply without hesitation and still get a decent product.
EvenDigit
EvenDigit is a marketing agency that has created its own Persona Generator tool for everyone to use. It’s a basic tool that is fast and easy to use without complicated features.
Features of EvenDigit
Easy to use user persona generator with a basic design that everyone can work withComprehensive data input with 9 different segments to create highly detailed user personas
To an experienced designer, EvenDigit will feel like a very basic tool with not much to offer in terms of good user persona designs. However, an experienced marketer will definitely appreciate how detailed this tool is while remaining extremely user-friendly and fast.
Conclusion 🧑🦰 🧑🦲 👩
User Personas have always been extremely important for a business to achieve success. Nowadays, that need has branched out into having a great user persona template or generator that gets the job done the way you want it to. All of the tools mentioned in this list are great for a multitude of things, so going for any of them will not be a problem! You may also be interested in creating mockups for your products to go with the personas you have created.
