How to Create the Perfect Persona

Inspired by an article by a Instagram post by Michael Janda.

Personas are a critical deliverable of the research phase of any design or brand project.

They’re fictional characters that represent the various people in your target audience.

They allow you to shift your perspective from a personal view point into a user - someone who uses your brand or products.

This shift in your mindset empowers you to create solutions that truly resonate with your audiences need, wants and desires.

The process of creating perfect personas is the answer to those awful generic audience descriptions that we all, as creative professionals, hate.

We’ve all been in those briefing meetings where the client describes their audience as "mainly millennials" or "unisex, 20-40 years old".

This is not an audience!

It's too large a group of people, and doesn't account for individual personalities, motivations and goals.

This is the path to mediocrity, ending in no brand differentiation, or even brand death.

Keep your personas in mind during your entire creative process to ensure that your empathy with your end users remains strong, and your solutions relevant.