User personas template

The user personas template offers a great way to kickstart your ideation and brainstorming as you develop a better understanding of the problems you're solving and the people you're solving them for. Developed by the Product School of Silicon Valley, this template includes out-of-the-box features and guidelines to help facilitate an effective, efficient session, with actionable next steps as you develop your next round of features or new product(s).

When should you use a persona template?

Use a persona template when you need to deeply understand your target audience. Using a persona mapping template can help you focus your audience’s needs. After all, they are the main focus of your projects, marketing collateral, and upcoming products. Let’s dive a little deeper into how you can use them:

• Crafting marketing strategies: Personas help clarify who your customers are, their pain points, and how to effectively communicate with them.
• Improving customer support: To deliver more personalized and empathetic customer service, understanding user personas can guide your approach.
• Developing content: When creating content, a persona template helps you shape messaging that resonates with your audience’s interests and challenges.
• Launching new products: Before introducing a product, personas provide insight into whether it will align with the audience’s expectations and desires.

Using a persona template helps teams remain user-focused and consistent across various touchpoints — 26% of leaders believe that poor cross-team collaboration is the biggest challenge in project management, making it the top-cited roadblock. Get ahead of it with this template.

The personas template helps you:

• Get a better understanding of the people using your product or service.
• Brainstorm solutions that directly address the issues your users are facing.
• Identify gaps or blindspots before getting to the development stage.

How to use the personas template

To use the Mural personas template with your team, follow the steps outlined below. Need an example template to get started? We’ve got you covered.

Before getting started

Before you start creating your user personas, you need to define your research goals. What do you hope to learn from your personas? What information do you need in order to make your personas as useful as possible? Once you have a clear idea of your goals, you can move on to the next step.

Step 1. Give your persona a name and a face

Giving your persona a name and a face will help you to humanize them and make them feel more real. Choose a name that reflects their personality or their role within your target audience. You can also find or create an image that represents your persona.

Step 2. Write down their demographics

What's their age, gender, occupation, education level, etc.? Knowing this information will help you to understand how they might interact with your product or service.

Step 3. Write down their motivations

What are their goals and needs? What motivates them? Understanding what they want to achieve will help you to design a better user experience for them.

Step 4. Write down their frustrations

What are their pain points? What are the things that frustrate them or cause them difficulty? Addressing these issues will improve their experience with your product or service.

Step 5. Repeat this process to create multiple user personas

Create multiple user personas to represent different segments of your target audience. This will ensure that you cater to the needs of as many people as possible. Once you've created multiple personas, separate your user personas into Primary and Secondary categories.

Tips for running a personas template exercise

To get the most out of the personas template with your team, you should:

• Use visuals (images, drawings, even videos) to help foster a holistic understanding of the user personas you're creating.
• Use Mural's private mode when brainstorming to avoid groupthink, and capture honest feedback on which ideas to prioritize with anonymous voting.
• Keep your user personas up to date as your audience and product continue to develop — this will help align everyone from product and engineering to marketing and sales.