The following is a post from the APG Team’s summer 2020 intern, Jaad Mohammed.
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Personas provide a vivid way for businesses to understand their customer segments, including customer needs.
Personas afford this by representing information, such as demographics, interests and pain points etc., of the customer based on, hopefully, real market research data. Personas also serves as an efficient communications tool among team members so that the team members have a shared view of the customer.
The information present in personas will determine how well the project stake holders understand their customers. For this advantage, personas should present key points needed for the best understanding of your customer. However, what specifically include in a personas profile is an open question. As a consequence, several difference persona profile templates have emerged.
Therefore, in this blog post, we compare and contrast 12 user persona template designs and compare the elements of each template with a holistic checklist with which you can determine what information you may or may not want to include when you make your own personas.
Persona Template Comparison
We have developed a persona profile checklist so that you can compare and contrast all the elements contained in the above-mentioned persona templates.
With this checklist you can see what elements are commonly used by most persona templates. Also, some of the more uncommon elements may indeed prove useful for different businesses.
We identify 33 persona profile attributes with 9 attribute groupings, as shown in Table 1.
An example of each of the 12 persona templates are below.
- Dribble 1: A minimalist design approach to personas. https://dribbble.com/
- Behance: A real example of customer persona template created for a project management application “Taskly”. https://www.behance.net/gallery/48002377/Personas
- APPLIEDBYDESIGN: An infographic design approach by APPLIEDBYDESIGN. http://appliedbydesign.com/#/home
- Dribble 2: A catchy design approach with vibrant colors. https://dribbble.com/
- Xtension: Xtension is a website that has a customizable user person template that’s free to use. You can view an example at https://xtensio.com/user-persona/.
- Personapp: This is another website that allows you create you own personas using their customizable template that’s also free to use. http://personapp.io/
- UserForge: UserForge is a customizable online persona creating tool. This is a persona template created by me using their website. https://userforge.com/
- Justinmind: Here we can see a free persona template provided by Justinmind. https://www.justinmind.com/blog/user-persona-templates/
- Content Harmony: Here Content harmony provides us with a B2B customer persona template. https://www.contentharmony.com/
- Buyer Persona Institute: You can see a simple descriptive person template made by BPI. https://www.buyerpersona.com/
- Composely: This is a free user persona template put together by Compose.ly. https://compose.ly/
- HubSpot: With Make my Persona by HubSpot you can create professional, customizable buyer personas with the help of their persona template generator. https://www.hubspot.com/
I believe you will find that APG offer many of these persona profile attributes and more!
Better personas! Better decisions! Better results!
APG is data-intensive! APG is fast! APG personas are rich!
Want to read more about APG?
Jansen, B. J., Salminen, J., Jung, S.G., and Guan, K. (2021). Data-Driven Personas. Synthesis Lectures on Human-Centered Informatics,1 Carroll, J. (Ed). Morgan-Claypool: San Rafael, CA., 4:1, i-317.
Jung, S., An, J., Kwak, H., Ahmad, M., Nielsen, L., and Jansen, B. J. (2017) Persona Generation from Aggregated Social Media Data. ACM Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2017 (CHI2017). Denver, Colorado. p. 1748-1755. 6-11 May.
Jansen, B. J., Salminen, J., and Jung, S.G. (2020) Data-Driven Personas for Enhanced User Understanding: Combining Empathy with Rationality for Better Insights to Analytics. Data and Information Management. 4(1), 1-17. https://content.sciendo.com/view/journals/dim/4/1/article-p1.xml
Contact me to get going w/APG!
Dr. Jim Jansen, email: bjansen@hbku.edu.qa