Although User Personas are a fundamental concept that is easy to understand when you try to put that into practice, you realize that writing a compelling persona is not that simple; there are several things you need to consider when creating a User Persona. It’s easy to create a persona, but creating a good persona that adds value to your product is tricky.

We have listed the three most common mistakes people usually make when creating a persona.

Data must back up every persona you create, and if you’re basing your personas on assumptions or a hunch, you have nothing.

There are two possible types of data when you’re creating a persona:

Quantitative data: All the data comes from Surveys, information that a CRM gives you, etc. When you’re searching for quantitative data, numbers are king. 

An example of a question that is seeking quantitative data would be:

“How many hours do people spend on a social network?”

Qualitative data: All the information you get from interviews, from observing the patterns instead of numbers, is more about categories. A quick example will be:

Do your intended users work full-time or part-time?

I’m conditioning the question to two possible choices. First, it’s either full-time or part-time.

Well, sometimes, people mistake the audience they’re targeting with the user personas, I mean, yes, the User Personas need to be based on your target audience, but it’s so much more than that. Remember that User Personas are archetypical characters that represent a larger group of people. In this case, you’re missing the whole character that will represent the needs of your target audience, their paint points, their motivation, and how this product will appeal to them.

Having a Target Audience doesn’t translate to having a user persona. With your target audience, you’d have the information you can use to create the personas, but you don’t have all you need to create them.

Example

You want to release a product for young adults with video game knowledge, so your target audience will be males and females from 18 to 30 years old, and their hobby could be playing video games.

Although this is a good starting point for your personas, you’re still missing the concept of motivations, paint points, product appeal, and much more. This type of information (target audience) is helpful, but don’t stick to that, expand on the concept of the target audience and create your personas.

This is usually a problem when the product team copies the same personas as the marketing team.

It’s one thing to be the user using the product, and it’s another thing to be the one buying it. Sometimes, the person who will be using the product and the person purchasing the product is the same, but sometimes they are not. So it’s essential to differentiate this when you’re building the product.

User Personas: These are the people you’re building the product. You want to know their goals, needs, motivations, pain points, and how your product solves them because they will be using your product, and if you don’t solve their problems, what value are you adding to them?

Buyers Personas: These are the people who will buy your product, they don’t necessarily have to be your end users, but they are an essential aspect to consider when building your product. You may have the most remarkable product in the market, but if your product doesn’t appeal to your buyer’s persona, you’ll not succeed.

Example

Imagine a scenario where you’re building a product for kids. The kids will be your user personas because they’re the ones who will be using the product. But that doesn’t mean the ones that are going to buy your product, to say in other words, you need to build the product for kids, they are your user personas, but in reality, who is going to pay for the product are their parents. So thus, we have a situation where the User Personas and Buyers Persona is not the same person.

You may say, ok, but this only happens when we create products for kids. The answer is no, and this happens more often than you think. You can see the same thing happening with software made for restaurant management or every other business management software. Following the line of the restaurant example, your end users will probably be cashiers, waiters, and cooking personnel. Still, the person who will buy the product from you is the owner of that restaurant. Of course, your end-users could market the product by telling the owner that your product is the best there is, and this will influence the owner into buying your product, but he has the final say on this, not your end user.