A persona is a description of a fictional individual. They are used to bring more life to the audiences on your list and help you better engage with them as real individuals. A persona helps those involved in a web project to really understand the needs and motivation of your target audience. As with the audience list they should be distributed to all members of your team and will be key in design, copywriting and user testing.

However, probably the most valuable role that personas fulfill is to act as a reference point. Once you have personified the target audience and given them a name, you can use them as a sanity check for development decisions. For example you can ask yourself “what would Ben think of this piece of functionality? Would he find it useful?” This helps the team to always remain focused on user needs.

How does one go about creating a persona and what information should it include? Let’s explore an example.

A persona is a mini biography, normally confined to a single sheet of paper. Each persona relates to a user group from your target audience list. You can create as many of these personas as you wish. I recommend creating at least one for each of your primary audiences. For our example we will create a single persona based on a fictional primary audience for a health spa website.