How To Create User Personas For Your App

For any seller, designing a mobile app for their store is a significant step towards success. It provides incredible flexibility in controlling and monitoring several aspects of the business. But developing a mobile app is not as straightforward as it sounds. Your app should be able to connect with the customers. It should be able to understand their problems and provide solutions to them, and for that, you must know your target audience and their preferences.

So how do you achieve that?

How on earth will you identify who’s on the other side even before you have had a chance to interact with them properly?

Simple — You have to create an app persona or a user persona.

What Are User Personas?

User personas are semi-fictitious characters that represent the types of people that could interact with your app. They are made using the customers’ behaviors, goals, motivations, needs, demographic attributes, interests, and other unique identifiers.

Now you might wonder - why create user personas?

The simple answer - they add a user-centric edge to your app development. This way, they improve the overall user experience right from the onboarding process.

In the age of personalization and customization, user personas will help you understand different challenges faced by different customers and how your app can solve their problems.

How To Create a Persona?

It is extremely rare for a business to target only one set of audiences. In the digital world, the key to success lies in catering to the needs of a wide range of customers. But on the flip side, you should also know when to stop. If you create countless personas, you will soon start realizing that some of them resemble each other.

Let’s look at the steps involved in creating user personas.

1. Research The Target Market

The first step in creating user personas involves in-depth research of the target market. You should try to find out your customers’ interests, challenges, and buying patterns through this market research. It will provide vital insights about them, and with these insights, you can develop your product and tailor marketing campaigns that will inspire and encourage customers.

In this stage, you can use one on one interviews or prepare surveys and try to find out about their experiences with similar apps. It is extremely crucial to learn about the customer’s negative feedback as well. It will help you learn from your competitors' mistakes and improve your customer experience. You can also use social media platforms to conduct research on your audience. You can monitor your competitor’s social media presence and understand what the customers think of that particular app.

2. Understand Customer Goals & Motivations

Post market research, you must focus on understanding the customer goals and motivations. You should figure out what drives them to download and use your app. You need to know what role your app will play in their personal or professional lives, and how it will help them achieve their goals.

For example, let’s consider an app in the fitness tracking category. One of the user’s goals is to track their fitness during workouts. If you are providing features that will track the customers' workout activities, you are helping them achieve their goals. And naturally, it will motivate them to download and use your app.

3. Identify User Challenges

Once you have understood the customer goals and motivations, you must try to identify the challenges that users face. By doing this, you will be able to understand the expectations of your users. They will help you resolve issues in UX design, app features, and much more.

For example, one of the challenges in using a fitness app comes in the form of tracking daily fitness goals. Customers can become busy, and it is quite natural for them to forget about it completely. To address this issue, you can provide push notifications that will remind them about their fitness activities for the day.

If you are an existing Vajro customer, then sending a push notification is a breezy affair. Click here to know more.

4. Create User Personas

Once you have enough data and information on your target audience, you can start putting all of them together and create different user personas. Each persona should have different names, and you must map the relevant information to them. First, you must add demographic information like age, gender, location, occupation, etc. After that you must focus on more specific details about the interests, buying patterns, pain points, and more. You can also use images to make personas more realistic.

Checklist For Creating A User Persona

• Name: Your user personas should resemble a real person, so giving them a name is important. Avoid common labels to create a fresh feel.
• Photo: As emphasized earlier, a photograph will add a realistic touch to the user personas. It is best if you can avoid celebrity photographs to eliminate prejudice and bias.
• Personal Motto: Personal motto is a one-liner that describes the persona and gives a basic idea about it.
• Bio: Add a backstory of the persona in the bio section. A bio will give a unique aura to your user personas.
• Demographics: By adding demographic information, you will be able to understand the user’s specific interests, wants, and needs, thereby helping you connect with them better.
• Personality traits: You must add any unique quirks that your persona possesses in this section.
• Motivations: What motivates them to use your product?
• Goals & Frustrations: The persona’s goals and frustrations will help you identify your business needs.
• Preferred Brands & Influences: This additional bit of information will help you understand how the persona thinks and what the benchmark is.

Summary

App design and development involve a lot of challenges. But creating user personas will help ease the pain. A user persona is semi-fictitious and generic in nature. But with detailed market research, you will be able to bring these generic groups to life. It will help your product team connect with the customers on a personal level and understand their goals and motivations. Moreover, with accurate user personas, you will be able to provide a seamless experience to a wide variety of customers, thereby increasing app engagement and customer loyalty.

Vajro is here to help as well. We are here to make your app development a seamless process. With our instant mobile app factory, we deliver your dream mobile app within a short span of time. Click here to book a demo now.

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