Create your own Product Persona
A step-by-step guide
In my last article, I wrote about how we automatically and unconsciously attribute human-like features to everything we interact with. I suggested constructing a realistic persona of your product to create a more natural interaction with your users. I call this a Product Persona. In this article, I give a step-by-step description of how to create your own Product Persona.
A Product Persona provides your team with a unified view of how your product interacts with your users. It resembles a real person which makes it easy to relate to. By combining a User Persona with a Product Persona you can design a consistent interaction style between your users and your product.
User Personas are a popular tool in the UX world. They generate empathy for the goals and needs of your users. By portraying data into a real person, it’s easier for your team members to empathize with.
However, every story has two sides. By only focusing on your user’s behaviors and goals, you forget to define who your product really is, and what it stands for. Your product is at risk to become a chameleon. It interacts differently to every situation just to meet the user’s needs. This inconsistency can result in unexpected and inauthentic behavior, which can affect your product and the relationship with your users.
A Product Persona defines how your product interacts with your users across all design aspects. A Product Persona defines the beliefs, motivations, interests and personality of your product. In contrast to a User Persona, it is built up of subjective data. This new method provides a more holistic approach, which will set you up for success in creating an engaging and relatable product.
How to create a Product Persona:
1. Choose a gender & age.
This makes communication easier in the rest of the process. I highly recommend using a randomizer for this to avoid unintentional gender or age biases and stereotyping. Only if your product is very specific for one age or gender, such as a menstrual cycle app, then a randomizer isn’t necessary.
2. Choose a name.
This can be the name of your brand or product, but can also be a new (more relatable) name. Again, the reason to do this first is that it makes communication easier for the rest of the process.
3. Research the vision, mission and values of your company, brand or product.
If this is not defined yet, this should be done first.
4. Translate the findings of step 3 into ‘interests’ and ‘beliefs, motivation and goals’ of the persona.
5. Let colleagues do a personality test about the persona.
Give your colleagues a description of the persona’s interests, beliefs, motivations and goals. Then let them fill in a personality test. I use the 16personalities test. You can also let your user do this too.
6. Define their strengths and weaknesses.
This is based on the results of step 5. If you give a clear description in step 5, you will find that there are many common overlapping traits.
7. Create a visual representation of your Product Persona.
This visual can be an illustration or a photograph or anything in between. However, it’s crucial it represents the findings above and it doesn’t enforce stereotypes. You can combat this by using a randomizer.
8. Bundle all the findings in one document.
9. Create a Product Persona card.
In short, a Product Persona helps you create a two-way narrative between your users and your product. This makes interactions with your product more consistent and authentic.
I’ve created a worksheet with all the steps, which you can download for free. This will help you use this new method with your team.
Curious how I created this method and the ideas behind it? I wrote about it in this article.
If you have any thoughts on how to optimize this method, please leave it in the comments below.
