Creating user persona is key to reach effective target audience for product and service design. User persona examples in UX will illuminate your path to create perfectly optimized Saas products.

What is a User Persona?

In the digital age, audiences are demanding user-oriented products. To respond to this kind of demand, you need to know who your users are and what they like.

Even if your SaaS product addresses users from different backgrounds, there have to be certain common points. User personas, also known as UX personas, are the characters, which will represent the pattern covering these points.

How to create User Personas

Creating precise user personas is not an easy job. You have to make tons of research on your real potential customers, gather the information you collected, pick out common points and then carefully define your user persona.

The key point in creating a user persona is working with real people. As long as your personas are based on actual human beings, your product will continuously gain new customers. For more information on how user personas are created and what the key points of doing so are, check out our article How to Create User Personas.

Typical user persona examples

If you are new to creating user personas, these user persona examples will help you at the starting point of your SaaS product design.

Persona 1: John, an entrepreneur

• Name: John Shaw
• Occupation: Owner of a bookshop, self-employed
• Demographic:
  • 34 years old;
  • Lives in New York;
  • Married with 2-year-old child;
  • Has a middle-income level;
  • He changed his occupation 3 years ago after getting married.

John’s story:

John was working for a global company and did not have much leisure time as his work was taking too much time. To start a family, he decided to quit his job and invest his savings in a bookshop, which has been his dream since his university years. All he wants to do is being able to maintain his bookshop.

What challenges John:

John is not great at accounting and he is getting lost while following the money he spends and earns. How much profit he makes at the end of the month is the biggest question he needs an answer to. He has to spend a long time to make an efficient analysis. And he quitted his corporate job to spend more time with his family.

What John needs:

John needs a product that will handle the analysis of his income. He is looking for an easy-to-use product that enables him to see how many books he has sold, how much money he has made, how much money he has spent, which category and title is the best seller of his shop. This product must give precise results and shorten the time he spends on managing the shop.

His popular quote about his needs: “I have forgotten to take notes about today’s purchases, AGAIN!”

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Persona 2: Catelyn, a Customer Success Manager

• Name: Catelyn Brown
• Occupation: Customer Success Manager
• Demographic:
  • 29 years old,
  • Lives in London, UK.
  • Married,
  • Has a middle-income-level,

Catelyn’s Story:

Catelyn is the customer success manager of a software company that provides customers with investing and trading tools. But their customers have a hard time understanding their tools and this situation affects their business. As this problem is Catelyn’s concern due to her position, her boss requests an immediate solution to it. Catelyn is ready to prepare an onboarding process which will help their customers understand the use of the tool.

What Challenges Catelyn:

A customer onboarding process requires a lot of coding and designing. And both these parts have to be fully integrated with each other. Catelyn neither knows how to code nor design, so she has a hard time communicating with her developers and designers on what the onboarding process should work and look like. She wishes she was an expert on coding and design so that she could create what she has in mind easily.

What Catelyn Needs:

Catelyn needs to be able to design this customer onboarding process by herself, as she designed. Instead of working with the company’s developers and designers, she needs to find a 3rd party company that will provide Catelyn with an easy to use user onboarding software. In that tool provided, she must not be expected to know how to code, or to create the designs for the customer onboarding flow.

Her popular quote about her needs: “I want to create our onboarding flow by myself without hours coding and designing!”

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Persona 3: Rebecca, a YouTuber

• Name: Rebecca Stone
• Occupation: YouTuber
• Demographic:
  • 19 years old,
  • Lives in Austin, Texas
  • Has money thanks to her family of high-income level,
  • Lives in her own apartment,
  • Lives alone.

Rebecca’s story:

Rebecca is a traveler and she is recording and sharing her trips, wherever she goes. Her family is considering her YouTube channel as a hobby. They are constantly telling her that she is wasting her time. They even said that they will no longer pay for her living expenses. However, she insists on making a business out of it. She is just a starter and needs tools that will help her understand her statistics.

What challenges Rebecca:

Rebecca can use a camera and edit her own videos. She knows all the technical processes about making a video. What challenges her is the distribution of her own videos. Even though her videos are well-prepared and interesting, she cannot reach her target audience. She has no clue how to analyze the data she has.

What Rebecca needs:

Rebecca does not want to solve her problem by hiring professionals. She is looking for solutions where she can manage on her own and is ready to pay any amount. The primary data she needs to achieve are the popular keywords searched by her audience, whether her videos are well-optimized for search engines, which platforms her audience uses the most, and how her statistics are doing.

Her popular quote about her needs: “I need a robot that will be my digital marketing assistant!”

In conclusion

As can be seen from the three user persona examples, you need to create profiles with personal stories. These stories will help you imagine how your SaaS product is used. You will know if there is a missing point.

Once you succeed in creating a realistic persona, you will clearly see the indispensable features of your product because a SaaS product requires to satisfy the needs and the preferences of real users. Without a user persona, you might get lost during your design process.