Lindsey Komson

Photo by Armin Rimoldi

User personas are an extremely valuable asset to reference when building a website. They help you understand your audience to design a product that aligns with their goals, beliefs, and attitudes. Let’s dive into what user personas are, how to create them, and an example I created for a project of my own.

What are user personas?

According to Maze, user personas are “user profiles that represent the wants and needs of a subgroup of your target audience. These personas are an in-depth analysis of our ideal customers and their behavior patterns, goals, skills, attitudes, problems, and background information.

User personas are key in helping user experience designers identify themes and patterns amongst members of a target audience. This helps designers connect with their target audience, practice empathy, and make better product decisions.

Personas in practice: ESPN

A few weeks ago, I did a website analysis involving two of the most popular sports websites on the internet – ESPN and FOX Sports. To read more about my analysis and key findings, read my blog post here: ESPN vs. FOX Sports: A user experience analysis.

To understand the types of users that interact with these websites on the daily, I created personas for people who would be likely to use the ESPN websites for various reasons.

First, I looked into my website analysis and brainstormed different reasons why people might use the website. The main goals I pinpointed were checking scores, watching live games, and playing fantasy sports.

Ben Le Ralph, founder of Impact Positive and Co-founder at Beaker & Flint, published an article on creating personas that includes a “Persona Notepad,” a resource I used in creating my personas for this exercise.

Since I’m one of the personas (as an avid sports fan and ESPN website user), I started with mine on the persona notepad to get an understanding of the terms I’d be using. It was interesting to learn about the different types of factors that encourage users to visit a certain website:

• Motivating factors: circumstances that might prompt a user to visit the website
• Inhibiting factors: circumstances that might hinder a user from visiting a website
• Possible triggers: events that immediately prompt a user to visit a website

I also learned about related personas and the persona matrix in this exercise. It’s important to see how different personas relate and differ from one another, something I practiced later on in the process.

After creating my persona based on how I use the ESPN website, I created my second persona, Jackson, based on someone who uses ESPN’s many fantasy features. This helped me compare my persona to Jacksons, how we use ESPN’s website in similar and different ways, and how our personas fall on each persona matrix.

View my personas here:

It’s clear that creating personas helps UX designers understand their audience to make a product work for them. Next time you start a project, consider including personas in your design process to create a product that is beneficial to all.