The Most Comprehensive List of Persona Interview Questions on the Web

Goal

We wanted to build the biggest list of interview questions for persona creation. This list should (a) be built from as many questions as possible to cover all aspects of persona profile creation, (b) contain no duplicates, and (c) have the questions sorted in meaningful themes so that they are easier to interpret and use for actual persona interviews.

Process

We came up with the following steps to achieve the above goal:

Search as many lists of persona interview questions as possible using Google
Scrape the questions from each list
Collect them in one spreadsheet
Remove duplicate questions
Identify central themes
Present final list

Findings

In total, we located 350 questions from 9 sources. The sources mainly consist of blog posts dealing with persona creation, and are listed in the bottom of this post.

Jansen, B. J., Jung, S. G., Nielsen, L., Guan, K., & Salminen, J. (2022). Strengths and Weaknesses of Three Common Approaches for the Creation of Personas: Strategies and Opportunities for Practical Employment. Pacific Asia Journal of the Association for Information Systems. 4(3), Article 1.

The themes were detected by analyzing the interview question content for common patterns. We ended up with 10 themes that are shown in the table below.

Table 1: Persona interview question themes.

Theme	Definition
Demographics	This theme contains the most basic questions that companies should be all be asking about theiir target customers. It help an companies target its consumers more accurately. Demographic theme divides a targets based on many variables such as Age, gender, family size, income, occupation, race, religion, education. etc.
Life situation	This theme includes questions that are designed to find out more about the general day-to-day life of buyer. As well as offering insights into their core personality, these questions should reveal a lot about what products and services they’re likely to be interested in and what would be useful to them.
Working Life	This theme contains questions about buyer working life such as their current job, current position, career goals, obstacles and solutions in their job. Your buyer persona has grown up and gotten a job. Questions about their working life will reveal many interesting details about them.That said, remember that when it comes to putting food on the table, the decisions we make are often out of necessity rather than choice – and the face we show at work may not be an accurate reflection of the person we are at home or with friends.
Decision Making	This theme contains questions about the buyer’s process in making decisions. Usually it will consist of stimulus; like goals to be achieved; problem awareness, evaluation, purchase and post-purchase. How they make decisions can determine the right product for the buyer.
Information Sources	This theme are importan because companies need to understand how they buyer consume information. Do they go online, prefer to learn in-person, or pick up newspapers and magazines? If they’re online learners, do they visit social networks? To Google? Which sources do they trust the most — friends, family, coworkers, or industry experts?
Consumer Habit	This theme contains the habits and preferences of buyers when buying products they will buy.
Marketing Team	This theme contains questions for marketing team members so that their performance is more centralized to be able to market products efficiently by knowing the problems and solutions in both the office and the market so they can find the appropriate target market.
Sales Team	This theme contains questions for the sales team member so that their performance is more centralized to achieve sales targets by knowing the problems and solutions in both the office and the market.
Pain Point	This theme contains the problems faced by buyers and how companies can see and find solutions to these problems.
School Life	This theme contains questions about the lives of buyers during their school days. What subjects did they take, what extracurricular activities they participated in, what kind of school they attended etc. As much as the experiences we have at school and college help shape us as adults, the attitude we have in our younger years is a strong hint as to the type of person we’ll grow into. As these questions can lead to conclusions, what kind of buyer matches the company’s products.

The Final List

Out of the 350 questions, we identified 74 as duplicates (i.e., the same question appears twice or more). After removing the duplicates, we ended up with 276 questions (78.9% of the initial list).

The final list can be downloaded from GitHub: https://github.com/joolsa/Persona-Interview-Questions

Sources

Carol Ann Tan	https://www.sprk-d.com/blog/21-essential-questions-to-ask-during-a-buyer-persona-interview
Carly Ries	https://www.smartbugmedia.com/blog/55-questions-to-ask-when-developing-buyer-personas
Kaitlyn Petro	https://www.impactbnd.com/blog/buyer-persona-questions-to-ask-in-your-persona-interviews
Lindsay Kolowich	https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/buyer-persona-questions
Mark Loehrke	https://www.clariantcreative.com/blog/creating-personas-interview-questions-to-get-you-started
Sujan Patel	https://sujanpatel.com/marketing/150-buyer-persona-questions/
Qatar Computing Research Institute	https://persona.qcri.org/blog/how-to-create-personas-a-list-of-common-interview-questions/
Jesse Ness	https://www.ecwid.com/blog/how-to-create-buyer-personas-for-an-ecommerce-store.html
Ardath Ablee	https://marketinginteractions.typepad.com/marketing_interactions/2013/02/personas-in-the-closet.html