Free UK personas download - what is a persona?

Personas are fabricated or synthesized characters created to represent the different user types or people within a targeted demographic that might use a product, site or service. Personas are useful in considering and understanding the goals, patterns, skills, attitudes, desires, and limitations of users or people. This is done in order to help guide decisions about development of a product or service such as features, interactions, price and visual design. Personas are generally used in product design and are likewise considered as part of interaction design for software or websites for marketing purposes.

Grid-Tools can help organizations in different verticals create and manage personas. Using Datamaker, we've created data packs that include all of the synthesized data needed in a typical persona. Scroll down for further information or to download your free persona example.

Grid-Tools offer persona data packs for the following industries:

Healthcare
Finance/Banking
Telecoms
New media
IT software/Software development

What characteristics are included in a persona?

A typical persona usually includes:

a name and picture
demographics (age, education, ethnicity, family status, marital status, financial background)
job title and major responsibilities
social networking, email domains, IM’s
goals and tasks in relation to your site, product or service
environment (physical, social, technological)
a quote that sums up what matters most to the persona with relevance for your site, product or service

What are the benefits of personas?
Using personas to enhance your marketing and development efforts can bring many benefits, including:

improved product quality
a better understanding of customers
shorter design cycles
improved product quality
users' goals and needs become a common point of focus for the team
the team can concentrate on designing for a manageable set of personas knowing that they represent the needs of many users
by always asking,"would Jack use this?" the team can avoid the trap of building what users ask for rather than what they will actually use
design efforts can be prioritized based on the personas
disagreements over design decisions can be sorted out by referring back to the personas