Mastering user research is crucial for any experienced UX designer. Without diving into user problems, crafting solutions that genuinely meet their needs is impossible. To achieve this effectively, a thorough understanding of the user and their expectations is necessary. And that’s where comprehensive user research comes in. Creating personas stands as a key component of user research because it enables designers to empathise with users, understand their needs, expectations, and design solutions that resonate with them.
A quick and smart: AI as an ideation partner
In some cases, designers need to jump right in without extensive UX research. If time or budget constraints prevent interviewing real people, starting with preliminary personas based on past research data and educated guesses is a viable option. AI-powered tools can also assist in generating ideas during ideation and crafting preliminary user persona profiles based on these assumptions.
User persona generator
Founderpal.ai offers a user persona generator that collects basic information about the target audience and business type, instantly delivering a completed persona in just one click.
ChatGPT
Equipped with more insights or data from previous research, leveraging ChatGPT with a tailored prompt proves more valuable. The more information you give your AI tool, the better it will be able to help you.
Here is the prompt I crafted, based on the insights from the AI course by Dave Birss. ChatGPT prompt: “Adopt the persona of a professional user experience designer. You have deep understanding of user research, human behaviour and expertise in behavioural science, cognitive psychology. You are highly skilled at finding valuable human insights, analysing the data, identifying behaviours your target audience seeks to change and developing products encouraging users and supporting their needs. Write me a user persona for a <product or solution>. Primary user persona: <details about user profile and behaviour>. Include a short profile, personality, goals, challenge, frustration and concerns, motivation and what influences his behaviour most.”
Example: “Adopt the persona of a professional user experience designer. You have deep understanding of user research, human behaviour and expertise in behavioural science, cognitive psychology. You are highly skilled at finding valuable human insights, analysing the data, identifying behaviours your target audience seeks to change and developing products encouraging users and supporting their needs. Write me a user persona for a platform allowing to browse through recipes database, buy ingredients online and get them delivered home. Primary user persona: fitness enthusiast who does training three times a week and spends approximately six hours cooking per week. He is following a meal plan which he is creating a week in advance. Include a short profile, personality, goals, challenge, frustration and concerns, motivation and what influences his behaviour most.”
Persona photos
While photographs for personas add a personal touch, they may introduce bias. If needed, image generation tools like thispersondoesnotexist.com can help to generate realistic persona photos.
Leveraging user persona templates
Once initial insights are gathered, converting them into user personas is easy. Sharing these personas with your team fosters collaboration and guides next steps.
If you like this example template, I’ve got you covered with a handy user persona template, all set up in Figma format on my profile page in the Figma community. Feel free to integrate it into your next design project and speed up your workflow!
Moving forward
While preliminary personas offer valuable starting points for connecting with your target audience, they do not replace the need for thorough research to verify assumptions and create well researched personas. However, they serve as an effective way to kick off the discovery phase and lay the foundation for next phases.