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Personas are characters that represent user types derived from user research. They are used in many human-centered design principles, and they reflect user needs, behaviors, and goals.
However, building usable personas goes beyond simply naming a few fictional characters—it requires research and attention to relevance and clarity. When done right, personas can be powerful tools that guide your team through the design process and provoke outside-in thinking within your organization. Helping everyone stay aligned and focused on the people who matter most: the users.
In this article, we will explore the origins and benefits of personas, common pitfalls to avoid, and practical strategies for creating personas that are actionable and useful throughout your design process.
Alan Cooper is commonly known as the person that created the first persona, in 19851. Wanting to make a new product user friendly, he understood he needed to understand his users well. He conducted interviews and created a composite of the findings in a persona, named Kathy. Kathy helped him to think about user needs and expectations, and helping him in the process to make decisions.
Personas help bring your users to life, making their needs, behaviors, and pain points memorable and relatable throughout the design process. They shift decision-making from vague assumptions to fact-based, user-centric thinking, keeping focus on creating solutions that bring meaningful value to users.
One important advantage is that personas can let your user almost become alive in your organization and in the design process.
Rather than presenting your findings in a Powerpoint presentation of sorts that is easily forgotten and tossed aside when the project goes into next phases, personas are recognizable, memorable and easy to empathize with. In general, people do better with faces.
Teaching yourself and others to say ‘Alex would find x’ instead of ‘our users probably find y’ is a powerful way to provoke outside-in thinking. Meaning that decisions from the organization, from whatever roles, will be more likely to be based on facts rather than assumptions.
It can be a great tool to consolidate your research findings and make them usable and actionable. It forces you to keep the user in mind, instead of focusing on statistics and feature ideas alone.
It can can help you to stay focused what really matters.
Creating personas can be a powerful tool in the design process, but they are often misused or poorly executed. These mistakes and pitfalls can lead to biased assumptions, overlooked user needs, and personas that ultimately don’t contribute to better design decisions.
Often times personas contain a lot of fluff to give the user a certain personality. Think about information like personality traits, certain demographics, unnecessary personal background, job titles without context. Most of the time this data has no value in the decision making process. Not only does this information steer the focus away from the things that do matter, they can actually increase the risk of bias, stereotypes, and assumptions.
Giving personas stereotypical names and photos can unconsciously reinforce bias. Example: Naming a professional persona “John the Engineer” and a caregiver persona “Maria the Nanny” plays into gender and ethnic stereotypes.
One of the biggest mistakes in persona creation is trying to represent every possible user in a single persona. While it’s tempting to create a broad, all-encompassing profile, this often leads to a generic persona that lacks depth and actionable insights. A persona should be specific enough to highlight meaningful behaviors, motivations, and pain points—otherwise, it won’t effectively guide decisions. Instead of making a vague, catch-all persona, focus on the most critical user types that have distinct needs and challenges.
On the other hand, not creating enough personas can also be a problem. If a product serves multiple user groups with different goals and workflows, limiting personas too much can cause gaps in understanding. For example, an e-commerce platform might cater to both casual shoppers and wholesale buyers—two groups with very different needs. If only one persona is created, key features could be overlooked for one group.
Personas should be tailored to their specific purpose, refreshed with real data, and refined over time to stay relevant.
The next big mistakes lie more in how they are created and used in organizations. Often times personas are created in a design team, without including other people in the company. At the end it’s then presented as some sort of art work hanging them on a wall somewhere.
It’s up to the creators of the persona to ensure that it will come alive. This means involving and updating stakeholders along the way, maybe even letting them sit in on a research session.
Another common pitfall is similar to creating that Powerpoint we discussed earlier; not using it after it’s presented. Personas are only as useful as you make them. Make sure to involve your persona in every design decision, and to mention them outside of your own team. Don’t make it a checkbox to tick on your to-do list; keep them around and update them when new information comes to light.
A well-crafted persona is rooted in real user data and designed to be a practical tool in the decision-making process. To be effective, personas should focus on actions, motivations, and challenges, rather than superficial details or assumptions. Below are key principles to follow when creating personas that truly add value.
Personas should be based on real-world observations and research, not assumptions or guesses. The most reliable personas come from field studies, user interviews, and usability testing, where actual user behavior is analyzed. Surveys and analytics can also support this process, but direct observation provides richer insights into how users interact with products, what frustrates them, and what motivates their decisions. Without this foundation, personas risk being fictional profiles that don’t reflect real users.
Personas should focus on actionable insights that directly guide decision-making. Prioritize key items such as the user’s problems, tasks, goals, and barriers, while emphasizing behavioral patterns, frustrations, and needs. For example, rather than stating “35-year-old working mother,” focus on how she interacts with the product: “Needs quick, efficient ways to complete tasks on the go” or “Struggles with information overload and wants a simple, clear interface.” This approach ensures that personas are grounded in what users do and why, making them more relevant and useful in the design process.
Instead of creating personas based on broad demographics, it’s more useful to define them by roles and contexts. A good persona name, like ‘Nina Night Owl Student’, highlights the role the user plays when interacting with the product. This approach shifts the focus away from fixed traits like age or occupation and toward how the user behaves in a specific situation. It provides contextual relevance that helps to focus on Nina's behavior, such as needing study tools that are accessible at night or that can adapt to her nighttime routine.
Personas are a valuable tool for designing user-centered products, but only when they are built correctly and used effectively. A well-crafted persona should be more than just a document—it should actively guide design decisions throughout the process. This means ensuring personas are based on real research, focus on behaviors and needs rather than assumptions, and are kept relevant through ongoing updates.
Avoid common pitfalls like overloading personas with unnecessary details, trying to represent too many (or too few) users, and treating them as static artefacts rather than living tools. Instead, integrate them into daily workflows, involve stakeholders in their development, and refer to them consistently to keep the user perspective front and center.
Ultimately, personas should empower teams to design with clarity and confidence, ensuring that decisions are driven by actual user needs rather than guesswork. When done well, they bridge the gap between research and design, making products more intuitive, accessible, and impactful.
(1) https://www.delve.ai/blog/the-history-of-buyer-personas#:~:text=1985%3A Alan Cooper creates his designs more user friendly.
(2) https://www.nngroup.com/articles/why-personas-fail/
