Personas are fictitious profiles of your users – or potential users developed to help you create marketing and services to help target audiences.
They can be really powerful tools to help staff ensure the resources and services we offer are hitting the mark.
There are a lot of great sites to help you delve into creating effective personas providing tips for creating personas that work to free templates.
A few keys to success with personas:
- 3-5 is typically a good place to start. The number of profiles might be larger especially for libraries with diverse user bases.
- Include a picture and basic biographical information to make the persona more real.
- Think about: motivations, goals, and pain points for this individual. The more you think about these pain points, the more useful the persona. For example, what are the barriers to service they face? Information Literacy, connectivity, time, devices, transportation are a few examples. If your library is looking at a specific service, how can you help the user overcome these obstacles?
Persona Resources on the Web:
- UX Design Mastery – Examples created for their clients with the reasoning behind each design. A great first step.
- Mockplus – What Is & How to Create Perfect Personas Step by Step – a step-by-step guide for creating effective personas. The site is really easy to use and will help you create by in for this new strategy
- UX Planet – 18 Free User Persona Templates – A curated list of places to download templates as well as tips for success.
- HubSpot – Buyer Persona Research – looks at the strategies. The article is a look at how you create strategic decisions on your personas.
- Venngage- 20+ User Persona Examples, Templates and Tips For Targeted Decision-Making – Step by Step guide of creating personas along with some template options.
- Your Guide to Successful Persona Building by Lex Joosten – A great article walking through the development of personas including how to pull in your research effectively.