So, you are building a great product or service, but do you know whom you are building it for? When creating products, it is crucial to have a well-defined user persona to meet your customers’ needs. That is why we use user personas to guide us.

A user persona is a fictional or archetype character that represents the needs or behaviors of a larger group based on research. A user persona is a single person that means many people. For example, Steve Rogers is one person that represents superheroes. If a product were built for Steve Roger, many other Avengers would also find it helpful.

Other than helping superheroes, using a user persona allows a business to bring value to its target audience.

User personas ensure that the product meets the users’ needs and prevents teams from following two traps.

• A self-referential design is when a product is made for oneself rather than the user base. The person creating the product can be a user persona, but if they are not the target audience, you need more than one user persona to ensure the product is made for whom you are building it.
• Elastic User Design is when a generic user means different things to different people. In a meeting, two people can discuss the same persona, but they relate to each persona differently. This is especially true when working with stakeholders because they have an idea of who the users are but may not have the scope of their pain point. Even though we are using the same vernacular, our definitions are different.

All in all, user personas bring value to your team by ensuring that the product or service meets your customers’ needs.