A comprehensive user persona can be the key component to a successful product. While creating user personas is generally a standard strategic step, utilizing inadequate or incorrect data can derail product development before your team even gets started.
To successfully incorporate user personas into product planning, there are a few things you need to ask yourself. There are also a few expert tools to help you get there.
Are User Personas Really Useful?
First things first: are user personas worth the effort? This is a question some people ask, and it’s a reasonable worry. Personas are a culmination of targeted audiences and can therefore quickly turn into a hypothetically ideal customer who’s closer to fiction than reality. Further, if the personas are just lists of facts and demographics, they fail to provide actionable context for product teams.
Often, personas are created to check boxes, ignoring the complexities of the real target audience — not all projects need them. However, if you can avoid stereotypes and critically analyze the data you’ve gathered during research, user personas can be a vital source of input. When all your user personas are clearly and realistically defined, creating an effective product experience or roadmap is much more realistic.
How Can Product Replays Help You Create User Personas?
The most accurate way to avoid unrealistic user personas is to incorporate feedback from real users. Though user personas generally are built during user research, creating or optimizing them at any point in development can help guide your product to success.
This is where Sprig’s Replays come into play. These clips of actual user sessions show you how people engage with your product, giving you real-time insights even when you’re already knee-deep in development. You can target Replays by user attributes and trigger them based on in-product actions. Sprig’s AI then categorizes the Replays to see patterns and how a user’s behavior changes over time.
You can save up to five minutes of an actual user session, giving you first-hand, relevant insights into your users’ motivations. Replays can be a powerful component in developing a complete user persona, especially when coupled with Sprig’s in-product Surveys.
How Can In-Product Surveys Help You Create User Personas?
Sprig’s in-product Surveys take the guesswork out of analyzing UX pain points and identifying optimization opportunities. You’ll prompt your customers while they’re actually in your product, giving you valuable feedback and sentiment data straight from the source. This can make a world of difference when pinpointing user personas either mid-product development or for your next feature and product launch.
You can generate in-product surveys with a few clicks. Choose between ready-made templates or implement Sprig’s AI Study Creator to build custom surveys with open text, multiple choice, matrix, and rating scale questions. You can set parameters to define which people see a survey and which actions trigger it. Think of Surveys as live user interviews that go out to people at exactly the right moments.
Install Surveys with a simple, one-time setup, and expect a 30% increase in response rates. After that, you can review the results in real-time, including right as new survey responses arrive. This data is a powerful basis for Sprig’s AI Analysis, which you can leverage into worthwhile product takeaways and user personas.
How Can AI Analysis Help You Create User Personas?
Sprig’s GPT-powered AI Analysis goes beyond demographics and facts — it connects the dots for you and sorts product learnings into themes. You’ll instantly see behavior trends alongside product strengths and opportunities. You’ll really get to know how your users think, feel, and act.
With Sprig AI, you also can filter survey responses and learnings by period and user attributes to determine how themes change with time and cohort. This matters — different audiences use your product in different ways, and that’s why you’re creating compelling, actionable user personas in the first place. By spotting user trends, you gain invaluable insights on how to evolve your product to become more beneficial.
Common Mistakes to Avoid When Creating User Personas
User personas are only helpful if they’re realistic and complete. This means that keeping data accuracy at the forefront when collecting information is pivotal. It’s how you minimize bias that will falsely influence your user personas. Avoid the below not-always-so-obvious pitfalls when conducting user research for developing a persona.
- Don’t zero in on demographical data instead of actual behaviors. Age, gender, location, and so on can easily lead to unintentional stereotyping that distorts a user’s true product journey.
- Don’t ignore the diversity of your customer base. Your products’ end users aren’t one-size-fits-all. You should account for a range of personas.
- Don’t make assumptions about the real-life people behind the personas. Filter out expectations based on your own point of view, and back up your themes with data. For example, let’s say you’re using social media, not just in-product surveys and replays, to inform your personas. Social media behavior is often how customers want to be seen, not necessarily how they actually behave. You need meaningful, high-quality data from surveys and replays to supplement it — or, when necessary, replace it.
- Don’t forget to continuously update the user personas. This means not relying on outdated information, and it means keeping causation and correlation separate.
Make User Personas Personable
User personas provide context that help you create effective products and services — but they only succeed when you thoughtfully and correctly research them. Demographic-based user personas often fall short of providing an accurate understanding of the real people behind the basics. Instead, use data research to identify user motivations, needs, and pain points with automated, precise tools.
Sprig’s Replays, in-product Surveys, and GPT-powered AI Analysis are ideal allies to set product development on the most productive path. They help you build meaningful personas that minimize your churn, yielding a product that’s a major success with end users. Give your team the advantage with Sprig today.