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Jakob Nielsen, co-founder of the Nielsen Norman Group, once said "pay attention to what users do, not what they say."
When creating a user persona, you’ll need much more than hearsay from past users. You’ll need to focus on the what, how, and when just as much as the who to nail down your product designs, marketing goals, and customer journey mapping.
After all, a user persona is a fictional profile that represents a target audience segment based on real user data. It includes demographics, goals, behaviors, and pain points.
So, where do you start?
In this article, we’ll share not only how to create a user persona, real-life examples you can learn from, but share 20 professionally designed user persona templates you can customize to make your own.
Here's a short selection of 8 easy-to-edit user persona templates you can edit, share and download with Visme. View more below:
Ready to start creating game-changing user personas? Here’s a video you should watch. It’s all about creating an effective user persona and building valuable solutions for your target audience.
Before we dive in, let’s explain what a user persona is and why it matters.
So, how do you define a user persona? A user persona is a semi-fictional character representing the profile of your ideal customers. User personas are particularly useful for growing your business or improving customers’ experiences with your product or brand.
Why is this important?
Sinlee Loh, Research Manager at Meta shares that; “As a user researcher, you will often be looked upon to explain why and also how to fix [users’ problems]. The best researchers understand how to make recommendations based on data.”
With a detailed user persona, companies can visualize the needs and motivations of their target user and build relevant connections with them. You can uncover how people search for, engage, buy, and use your products. The more you understand your audience, the easier it is to tailor your products to meet their needs.
But what does a user persona typically include?Some user personas might be more detailed than others, depending on your goal, but a general rule of thumb is that a user persona should include:
To help you understand the concept better, here’s a real-life user persona example.
Meet Sarah Bradford, a user persona for Airbnb developed by UX/UI designer Renee Fok as part of her capstone project. Sarah represents young professionals who frequently organize group trips—a key customer segment for Airbnb's platform.
Through Sarah's persona, Renee uncovered a significant business challenge: Airbnb’s platform wasn't supporting group communication effectively.
While the primary booker could message hosts, other guests couldn't, creating friction in the booking experience. Introducing a group chat feature, then, could help improve the app’s user experience and overall customer satisfaction.
A well-researched user persona doesn't just show you who your customers are, it can also reveal opportunities to improve your product and grow your business.
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When it comes to creating user personas, there's not just one way to do it.
There are four main types of user personas, and each helps you learn something specific about the people who use your products.
Understanding these types helps you create user personas that highlight exactly what you need to know about your customers. This way, you can build a product they'll actually want to use.
Now, let's talk about how to create a user persona for your business or next project.
As someone with years of design experience, especially in the UX space, I’ve seen how often people underestimate the preparation that goes into building a solid user persona.
And that’s usually where things go wrong. There’s often a major disconnect between who teams think their user is and who that user actually turns out to be.
So, I’ll walk you through the essential steps to creating an effective user persona, not just how to design one, but how to make it something your team can actually rely on.
Before you research your user, you first need to define their behavior.
Starting with your persona’s age, gender, and income is the easy part—but that only covers about 20% of the real work. It’s behavior that drives the remaining 80%.
Why? Because demographics tell you who someone is; behavior tells you what they’ll actually do with your product.
Understanding behavior helps you research your user persona more effectively—so you’re working smart, not wasting time or resources. It also ensures you're not working backwards and that your persona supports your overall goals.
Take Spotify, for example. They created six distinct personas based on real user behavior, not age brackets. Each one represented different needs and usage patterns, which then shaped product features.
Here are some behavior-first frameworks you can consider using:
1. Task Completion Patterns
2. Decision-Making Speed
3. Skill Application
Next, is the lengthiest part of the user persona creation, research.
The foundation of any good persona is solid research. This means combining both hard data and qualitative insights to build a complete picture about your existing users. If your brand is new, conduct marketing research to create an ideal user or customer.
There are a vast number of ways you can do this kind of research. Olha Zaplatynska, Product Marketing Manager at Visme shares her experience on how she gathers user data for personas, strategies and more:
"The tried-and-true strategies for collecting valuable user feedback are through email surveys, user calls, in-app surveys, NPS pop-ups, reaching out to beta users, loyal customers, and running polls on social media and your website. Analyzing support tickets, running user testing interviews, setting up a feature request system, watching user testing videos, and even having face-to-face meetings and chatting with people at events are also super effective methods"
While all these sound great, most people fall into a common mistake. Thinking research is a one-and-done task.
That might’ve worked for traditional user personas, but it doesn’t cut it today. Especially when launching a new product, website, or campaign, you need to research your persona in phases.
Here’s how to break it down.
| Phase | Goal | Execute This | Success Metric |
| Phase 1: Behavioral Clustering (Week 1) | Identify user behavior patterns, not demographics | Analytics Deep Dive, Support Ticket Analysis, User Interviews | Cluster users into 3-5 distinct behavioral patterns |
| Phase 2: Behavioral Validation (Week 2) | Validate behavioral clusters with real user data | Hypothesis Testing, Behavior Mapping, Pain Point Verification | If the persona represents 20% of users, it's scoped right |
| Phase 3: Context Architecture (Week 3) | Understand environmental triggers for behaviors | Environmental Mapping, Constraint Identification, Trigger Analysis | Map the entire user journey with every interaction |
| Phase 4: Outcome-Driven Profiling (Week 4) | Build personas to predict user behavior and guide design | Behavioral Narrative, Decision Framework, Success Metrics | Predict persona reactions to new features |
| Phase 5: Activation and Evolution (Ongoing) | Integrate personas into decision-making and keep them current | Decision Integration, Stakeholder Alignment, Continuous Updates | Keep personas updated with new behavioral data quarterly |
Now that we’ve done the hard part, now it’s the easy part, putting all the research and data for your user persona together.
Starting with a template saves you time and keeps you from missing important details.
Visme offers dozens of user persona templates for various industries and purposes. You can find some of these templates later on in this article (skip to section) or access them all by logging into your Visme dashboard. Don’t have an account? Sign up here for free.
When choosing your template, think about:
Can’t find the perfect template? Use Visme’s AI designer to create a custom design tailor-made for your unique needs.
Alternatively, you can start from scratch using a blank canvas. Visme offers all the tools you need to build the perfect user persona right inside the editor—from preset text and content blocks to shapes, arrows, lines, icons, color themes, illustrations, images and AI tools.
This is where your research comes to life. Take that spreadsheet data, plug it into your user persona template and transform it into something visual and engaging.
You can use Visme’s AI Writer to craft compelling headings, summarize your content, make bullet points or even help you brainstorm.
After adding all the key information you gathered about your users, make it look amazing by changing colors and fonts to match your brand (Visme lets you do this with one click).
Here’s what you can do in Visme to personalize your user personas:
To create a solid user persona, you need to get input from all your customer-facing teams, including marketing, sales and customer service.
In Visme, once you’ve finalized your persona’s design, you can invite other team members to give feedback, make edits or simply review it before sharing or printing.
Our design collaboration tools make it easy to leave comments, annotate and work simultaneously on any project. You can also use Visme’s workflow feature to assign tasks, set deadlines, track progress and set up reviews or approvals.
Visme lets you share and publish your user persona in several different ways. You can:
Jump to the user persona template that catches your eye or keep scrolling to see them all.
Are you running out of time or looking for a jump start on your user persona visualization? Try Visme’s AI Document Generator. Follow the chatbot instructions, input a prompt and generate a first-draft user persona in minutes. Customize it as much as you want in the Visme editor.
This persona describes beginner and novice programmers who need help writing better code faster. The design uses percentage meters to visualize the user’s technical debt. The reading order in this design is a bit different from the usual left to right, adding an interesting layer to the template.
The user persona template for a project manager is visually direct and to the point. The color story grabs your attention with the bright pink over dark gray.
If you have many customer personas for your business, this template is easy to replicate and edit. Make sure to use different photos for easy browsing.
This marketing persona template is an excellent example of a combined user and customer persona layout.
A persona template like this one is great for crafting enigmatic storytelling and effective lead generation techniques. Everyone on the team can get valuable input for communicating with the ideal user and customer.
Buyer personas for a specific tool they will use a few times are different from a product user whose use is constant and necessary. This example leans more toward a customer persona than a user persona. The blue color scheme makes it versatile for any industry.
Get help transforming the content from a buyer persona to a user persona with Visme’s AI Writer. Prompt the tool to adjust personality traits, features, reactions and demographics to better suit your persona.
Customer personas for services like coaching and advisory services need to be specific about what type of information you’ll be sharing with clients. With this persona marketing template, you can easily gather data to figure out the needs of the people looking for exactly what you offer. Create the customer persona around that data.
Customer archetypes are fictionally created people using data about people in general. Many people in the world fit the sample personas in this template. Are they your target market? Start here and then add more specific details to the customer journey map.
Your persona can be about different aspects of people’s lives. The data you choose to pinpoint describes where exactly you’re directing efforts.
Is their persona story about their job? Is it about their family? Or maybe it’s about aspirations and dreams? This one is about the work aspect. Tap into real needs and frustrations from the data you gathered in the marketing research using this persona map template.
The fitness enthusiast customer persona describes the ideal potential buyer and user for a fitness app or fitness product. A unique design makes this template go to the next level.
You need to input the users and buyers that your team brings to life in a spreadsheet. If you’re a freelance marketer, this template is a great option to use for clients. You’ll make a positive first impression.
How do you fit a specific section of a generation in a customer persona archetype? You look at what content they share online and get inspiration to select colors, shapes and layouts.
Use the visuals that the archetype in the user persona would be attracted to; this also helps your marketing team know what speaks to the customer.
Pinpointing your customer’s habits and frustrations is the key to crafting the marketing messaging for your brand. You’ll know who you’re talking to and what topics to talk about.
When everyone on your team has the same information, all the content from the website to email funnels is connected and harmonious. Use this simple user persona template to get everyone on board.
Radial percentage gauges are an easy visual tool to measure the personality traits of a user persona. Use terms that are easy to understand without needing to ask any more questions.
Include a small sentence for further information if you need to explain more. This audience persona template design includes four radial gauges to customize with your data.
Get to know your customer’s aspirations in life and work. Their goals and dreams are where you and your brand come in.
Knowing what they want to achieve helps you create products and content that will help them thrive. Everyone needs something; user personas are the recipe for knowing what that is. This sample persona template is a great place to start.
For brands that offer specific products to solve a unique need, creating a brand persona template needs to go deeper into the details.
What drives your target market to seek out a product like yours? Are you aware of the specific needs you can fulfill? Each circle section in this brand persona template goes into the details with precision.
Keep your team inspired to create great content with user persona templates that deliver all the information they require and look fantastic.
Colorful designs paired with practical information help teams be more productive. They can collaborate on different types of content that aim at one main goal, reaching the real people that the user personas represent.
When creating user personas, think of ways to talk about their work, life issues, and other thoughts that can help shape an idea of your target market.
Use fictional quotes to represent their thoughts, with quotation mark designs in their own section of this persona UX template. You’ll have an easier time with this when you conduct customer surveys and polls.
Try using a flowchart to visualize your user’s needs, starting from the primary need and progressing to more detailed requirements.
This flowchart can mimic the customer journey, helping you create content to convince audiences that what you offer is what they need.
Real estate companies usually have more than one persona, or groups of personas, to which they can direct personalized marketing strategies.
Using this detailed customer persona template for a college student, the company can create Facebook Ads for small rentals targeted at college students like the one described in the persona.
Personalized marketing is easy when you have user personas for all possible customer types. A business like an e-commerce store that “sells everything” will have numerous types of user personas, more so than a real estate company.
Use different customer personas to create additional customer journeys that end in the same place - conversion.
Add an ideal user story to visualize the type of customers that will interact with the brand. This example of a user persona template uses broad information from which the marketing team can expand to more detailed user profiles.
A user story taps into knowledge that helps figure out if the user experience is optimized.
Finally, this user persona template uses a double persona approach that matches the nature of the business.
A ride-sharing app that wants to appeal to the young professional must consider the combinations of user personas that might occur during one ride. This will help the human resources team create content to help drivers navigate brand values and culture.
Create your own free Visme account and start creating stunning visual content that your audience will love.
Looking for a user persona tool that actually fits your workflow? These are the top four user persona generators worth checking out, each with its own strengths, depending on what you're building.
HubSpot comes with a interactive online persona generator that creates professional buyer persona documents through a step-by-step wizard process. Users answer questions about their target audience through a guided wizard, focusing on details like job titles, career goals, tools used at work, reporting structure, and pain points. The tool then generates an editable Word document sent to your email
Top Features
Pricing: Completely free, but you’ll need to sign up to download or save your personas.
Best for: Teams who need a quick buyer personas with workplace context, particularly those already using HubSpot's ecosystem. Great starter template for beginners who need a persona.
Cons: You can only create three personas per account, which makes it limited for extended use.
Visme is a content creation powerhouse that gives you multiple ways to build a user persona tailored to your project. Whether you want to generate one instantly using AI, choose a pre-made template, or build from scratch, Visme’s got you covered.
What it is: A comprehensive design platform with customizable user persona templates and advanced visual editing features.
If you're using Visme's AI Document Generator, simply enter a few prompts and watch your persona go from text to a polished design in minutes. From there, you can fully customize colors, fonts, layouts, and branding, all at your fingertips.
Top Features:
Pricing:
Best for: B2B teams, freelancers, and agencies who need visually stunning, branded personas, whether for client presentations or internal use. Offers high customization and supports data integration.
Cons: Doesn’t offer advanced persona-building features like real-time behavioral segmentation or journey mapping. Personas need to be updated manually.
UXPressia Online Persona Creator is a customer experience focused platform with AI-powered persona generation, specializing in behavioral personas and customer journey mapping.
Users input business requirements or target audience details, and the AI generates detailed persona profiles with photos, behavioral insights, and regional specifics. The platform also offers persona chat functionality for real-time insights.
Top Features:
Pricing: Free plan available (3 personas), paid plans start at $36/month per user for unlimited personas
Best for: UX designers, CX professionals, and enterprise teams who need comprehensive behavioral personas integrated with customer journey mapping and require advanced collaboration features.
Cons: If you need extensive personas or full team collaboration without restrictions, that free tier may fall short.
Delve AI Persona Generator is another AI-driven persona generator that makes the list. It's great because it automatically creates data-driven personas from your existing customer data, website analytics, and competitor analysis.
The platform connects to your analytics data (Google Analytics, CRM systems) and uses machine learning to automatically generate personas based on actual user behavior and demographics. It can also analyze competitor websites to create competitor personas.
Top Features:
Pricing: Free plan with limited features, paid plans start at $89/month for business plans with 20% savings on annual billing
Best for: Digital marketers, marketing agencies, and data-driven businesses who want automated, research-backed personas generated from actual customer data rather than assumptions
Cons: It auto-generates personas using data from Google Analytics or social profiles, which is powerful—but it can feel restrictive. You get less creative freedom to manually shape the persona’s structure, visuals, or narrative compared to tools like Visme or UXPressia.
Disclaimer: The comparisons and competitor ratings presented in this article are based on features available as of June 12, 2025. We conduct thorough research and draw on both first-hand experience and reputable sources to provide reliable insights. However, as tools and technologies evolve, we recommend readers verify details and consider additional research to ensure the information meets their specific needs.
The difference between ‘persona’ and ‘user persona’ is simply semantic. A user persona falls under the broader category of persona, just like a buyer persona is also a persona.
A persona is a semi-fictional character that represents a segment of your audience, customer base or potential leads. It serves as a representation of an archetype backed by research and analysis. On the other hand, a user persona specifically represents current or potential users of a given service or product.
There are many best practices for how to create a user persona, but here are four of the most critical for creating successful user personas:
There’s no hard-and-fast rule about how many user personas a company or product needs. But there’s a long-standing consensus that a good number is between 3 and 5.
Yes, UX personas are very much still relevant. They help UX designers create human-centered products and services.
Here’s a UX persona template to help you build your own.
To identify user personas, research your audience through surveys, interviews, analytics and customer feedback.
Group users based on shared characteristics like demographics, goals, challenges and behaviors. Use this data to create an accurate representation of your typical user.
A user persona template is a ready-to-use framework that helps you map out your ideal customer profile. It includes standardized sections for demographics, behaviors, goals and pain points that you can customize according to your own needs.
Visme offers dozens of user persona templates for various industries, purposes and design preferences. You can easily customize our personas with your own info and branding, and then share or download with a few clicks.
The three core components of user personas are:
In simple words, a user persona is a detailed profile that shows who your target user is.
It includes information like their demographics, interests, goals, challenges and behaviors to help you create better products and services that improve the user experience.
The difference between ‘persona’ and ‘user persona’ is simply semantic. A user persona falls under the broader category of persona, just like a buyer persona is also a persona.
A persona is a semi-fictional character that represents a segment of your audience, customer base or potential leads. It serves as a representation of an archetype backed by research and analysis. On the other hand, a user persona specifically represents current or potential users of a given service or product.
Here’s to better personalized communication between your brand and its customers. With detailed user persona templates and data extracted through marketing research, you’re on your way to better marketing results and more conversions.
Use any of the customer persona templates in this list with your Visme account. If you don’t have a Visme account, getting started with Visme's document maker is as easy as logging in with your Facebook or Google account.
We can’t wait to hear how your new user personas take your business to the next level.
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