User persona templates

User persona templates provide the skeleton around which user experience (UX) and other teams can flesh out  composite user personas—characters that, while fictional, represent key research takeaways about a company's actual market base.

There are various types of user persona templates that product development, marketing, sales, and UX teams can experiment with according to their own purposes. Selecting the right template is a matter of trial and error, but the more exhaustive your market research is, the more accurate your final user persona will be.

A user persona template is useful in building out personas. Personas are helpful anytime companies face decisions about how to hone their products, services, or customer strategies but lack a clear vision about which customers they're trying to reach.

Personas are also useful when a company wants to proactively find a more ideal market base. They can then drive more sales, raise prices, or leverage greater customer relationships for higher revenue.

User persona templates, when applied well, can help companies direct their research efforts when crafting the personas to appeal to the most interested parties and maximize ROI. These benefits include:

• Refining UX design to better suit the tastes of the most important users

• Improving product design, ensuring the finished product meets or exceeds the ideal customer's expectations

• Fine-tuning marketing efforts to attract an ideal audience more effectively

• Improving sales figures with offers and promotions designed to appeal to the perfect buyer

• Prioritization of knowing exactly what should be built next based on strategy and knowing which feature with the least amount of work to go for next

• Informs strategy by understanding fully the motivations of which to solve for to be more competitive in the market but more importantly, more useful longterm for their userbase

A user persona's design heavily affects its perceived value to those using it. Putting thought into the user persona's structure and appearance can help to improve its perceived value, which in turn can elicit more respect and consideration. Even more importantly than the aesthetics, though, is the support and culture of the company. Cultivating support for the personas ultimately improves the chances of achieving a company's goals. User persona templates make it easier for staff to quickly start applying market insights to the market segment that matters most.

User persona templates make it much easier to create a user persona. They allow researchers to speed the process up without needing to start from scratch.

Many who otherwise wouldn't bother making a user persona find value from user persona templates, largely because they're:

• Give a great base and starting point to build on

• Give an idea of how to communicate data found

• Good ones are built off of sound market and what’s worked for others

• Inspires ideas and not solely based on impersonal demographics

• Pre-formatted with UX design principles to remove visual design as part of the effort

Most user persona templates include five standard elements, namely:

1. The basic necessities, which almost always include: • Name • Age • Location • Occupation • Education • Motivations and/or Objectives • Quotes

2. A picture—because nothing humanizes a user persona like a face

3. Personality, conveyed with a brief description, short tags, or personality test assessments (such as Myers-Briggs)

4. Goals and purpose, to represent the ideal user's underlying motivations

5. Pain points, revealing which problems users are trying to solve, especially as it relates to your product or service

You don’t have to include all of these elements. It’s best to construct and build a persona based off the most relevant and actionable data you have available. Data which makes each persona distinct from the other personas is also immensely beneficial.

Beyond specific user persona templates, a customer research platform can integrate numerous user personas across different data types, making it easier to spot themes and uncover actionable insights.

Different teams can identify and compare qualities across numerous user types that will most significantly affect company decisions—from which product features to develop to what channels to market.

Here are just a few user persona templates, tools, and other resources to get you started:

Dovetail: create personas with tags

This template allows you to organize user personas into primary and secondary behaviors, along with user-defined roles—social influencers, for example.

Dovetail: software persona tags

With this tool, each user type, such as shoppers and product users, can be compared at a side-by-side glance. It's also possible to search different "contexts," like user motivations, personality traits, and lifestyle habits, which you can then compare to basic demographic information.

Fluid persona template

The fluid persona template was based on a competitive analysis of numerous personas. It uses a long format that gives a strong narrative flow—an almost "day in the life" experience.

Adobe Express user persona designer

Enjoy expressing your artistic flair in full with Adobe's attractive web-based persona designer. It's intuitive to use and has everything needed to make your user persona truly unique (note: it requires a free sign-up to save your work).

Lucidspark persona template

Using this template, the design and aesthetic of your persona is taken care of. In this way, you can focus on illustrating the specific problems your customers face, helping you and your team understand your customers better. 

Miro persona template

This template can help you discover what type of information to focus on from your ideal customer and cater to their needs.

Xtensio persona template

You can create captivating user personas with this template. This will ensure every decision you make resonates with your target audience.

Which template should you use?

Consider both your organizational goals and the goals of your market base. Where those two overlap, you should have a good starting idea of which user persona template is right for you.

Remember that most companies make several user personas, to differentiate and identify different user segments.

If you're serious about finding the exact user persona template for your purposes, don't hesitate to try several templates and discover what purposes each is best suited for.