Customer Persona
Customer Persona helps to answer the important question of, “Who are we designing for?”
A customer persona or user persona is an archetype or semi-fictitious character created from the Design team’s ethnographic research. The persona represents a specific customer or customer group’s needs.
What is a Customer Persona?
Designers usually create a persona to help guide the creation of products or services with a specific user in mind, helping to answer the critical question of, “Who are we designing for?”.
Through use of empathy, the Design team can use personas to better understand the expectations and motivations of a customer or group – leading to the creation of more innovation solutions and exceptional experiences. Other advantages of using personas as part of the Design process include:
- Allow the Design team to view the problem and potential solutions through a different perspective (removing personal bias).
- Identify with and connect with the customer they are designing for, seeing the persona as a real person, which may motivate the team to create the best possible solutions.
- Create a shared understanding of who the customer is and what they expect, visualizing the personas motivations, desires, and needs to arrive at a common goal and provide direction for making decisions.
To view our other available tools and templates, please visit our online resource page. All PDF versions of our tools are free to download.
Download the Free "Customer Persona" Template (PDF)
Purchase the template to customize for your own organization
All of our tools and templates are available in Word or PowerPoint format to allow organizations to purchase and customize the templates to their brand standards.
Designers usually create a Customer Persona to help guide the creation of products or services with a specific user in mind, helping to answer the important question of, “Who are we designing for?”. This topic is a core concept of applying creative problem-solving through design thinking. To learn more about design, please visit our Introduction to Design Thinking Course.
The Design Thinking course teaches a creative problem-solving that will give any professional an advantage in their industry or career.
- Designers or Product Development professionals that are motivated to bring innovative new products and services to their business and customers.
- Consultants who want to offer their clients a model for applying creative problem-solving to help address business challenges.
- Human Resource professionals seeking to develop more human-centered solutions to support workforce members while driving higher levels of employee engagement.
- Members of Leadership who are wishing to gain competitive advantage by differentiating their business’s products and services.
- Individuals or Teams that are searching for new ways to solve complex problems by placing the customer’s needs at the center of their solutions.
This course will help expose the learner to various design thinking tools and mental models – all with the emphasis on innovating through creative problem-solving.
Our objective is to provide the learner with practical tools for applying a versatile 3-step design thinking process within their organizations. Through this framework, the learner will be able to reframe problems from the customer’s perspective. With this perspective in mind, the learner will drive improvements around the customer experience using tools such as deep-dive interview, journey mapping, empathy mapping, and rapid prototyping.
Need help introducing use of a Customer Radar at your organization?
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