How to Create User Personas

Personas are depictions of your different types of users, that describe who they are, their needs, and their motivations. They serve as a guiding light for developing tools and services. There can be multiple user types, or personas, for each service that your department provides.

Developing user personas is an important step to making sure your users’ needs are met when they come to your site. However, developing personas requires a large amount of research and resources, which is not always easily accessible to departments.

The City of Austin is moving towards user-centered design, which means truly understanding our users. If you are not able to dedicate resources to developing personas in depth, there are still ways you can put yourself in your users’ shoes in order to make sure they get what they need from your website.

Persona Examples

These personas were developed by the Resource Recovery department to understand the user personas of residents using their recycling services.

Persona Questions

Answer the following questions separately for each type of user:

• Describe who your users are:
  • Are they residents? Visitors? People thinking of moving to Austin? Do they own a small business?
• Why will they come to the site?
  • What are their needs?
  • Their interests?
  • What are their goals in coming to AustinTexas.gov?
    • What are they trying to do?
• How often are they coming to the site?
• When and how will users access the site?
  • Will they visit the site when they quickly need an answer about a service? Or will they visit to read about an update?
  • Are they using mobile phones? Desktops? Tablets?
    • How are they accessing the site? Analytics will help answer that questions- are they navigating through the homepage or dropping in from a search engine?
• Where (or from whom) else are they getting information about your service/similar services?
• How do you think your users feel about your services?
  • About your department?
  • Describe your interaction and your relationship with your user.
• What are some challenges you think they face?
  • With your site
  • With your service

If you would like further assistance developing your user personas, please contact Charles.PurmaIII@austintexas.gov