User persona examples to help you create your own
Personas are a great tool when it comes to developing a brand. They often bring clarity to the design process, as it is much easier to design with a person in mind rather than an abstract audience. So, what is a persona? A persona is a fictional character that has been created to represent a larger target audience. They are sometimes referred to as pen portraits, customer avatars or buyer personas.
Once decisions about a persona have been made, often a persona poster is created. A brand persona poster highlights common behaviours, outlooks and favourite brands of the target audience. This blog post takes us through some examples of branding personas, but first a brief look at the difference between UX or user personas and branding ones!
UX user personas
Often, branding personas look and feel a little different to UX personas. UX personas seek to find the pain points of a user or potential customers life, so that the product or service can seek to find a solution. Branding personas are a little different, with the designer instead seeking to understand the type of person they are designing for.
The example below in a great example of a UX persona, designed by Arthur Chayka and Shiera Aryev for Universe, an events company based in the US. If you would like to see more examples of UX personas, then we recommend giving Justinmind’s blog post a read.
Brand personas
Mailchimp personas
One of the best examples of a persona poster has to go to Jason Travis and Justin Pervorse for Mailchimp. Whilst they have been designed as UX posters, we think they are just as successful to help a brand process. The Mailchimp UX team interviewed lots of users and then collated the information into these striking images. They hung the posters in one of the busiest rooms of MailChimp HQ – allowing for plenty of conversations between the team.
InKind’s design process
A rough and ready example of persona posters, but a great example of including a entire team in the research process. InKind used an experience design session to define the personas. Starting discussions within the team about who their audience is and what their days look like.
Post-it notes
A template built by miro that is flexible enough to pick and choose what is useful to include for your branding persona. We’ve put together a blog post about all the questions you need to ask to build a robust persona.
© Miro
Korean newspaper infographic
Street H (<스트리트 H>) a Korean newspaper designed a persona infographic that is good fun! The mark of a good brand persona is if you feel like you understand the character at a glance, understand their needs and wants and perhaps most importantly, their design style.
A personal project from Jason Travis
A photography project from the designer / photographer behind the Mailchimp posters sums up the spirit of personas. The items that people carry around with them often sum up their style and their attitudes. Travis takes photographs of people with their belongings, and we think they do a pretty good job at illustrating
And finally, our brand persona posters!
At a dozen eggs, we’ve been creating our own user persona posters based on the CACI acorn classification – which segments the UK population into six larger groups. We often work with smaller companies who don’t have the budgets to conduct market research, but wish to have further insight into their potential audiences.
We’ve created 59 posters that have a central character together with demographic information – you can download them on our personas page. Or, if you would rather create your own persona poster, you can download our basic persona template.
