5 User Persona Examples to Help You Create Your Own

Creating a user persona is key to reaching an effective target audience for product and service design, I assume you already know this since you've begun to dig deep into the definition and benefits of User Personas already!

And I believe, it's equally important to see as many examples as possible since this is a matter of inspiration, knowledge in design, and familiarity with the subject.

So, today's article will speak to this exact need of yours. It will show you numerous examples of User Personas in user experience (UX) that will illuminate your path to creating perfectly optimized SaaS products.

Let's get started. 

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.

A User Persona is a fact-based, visual representation of a set of users that helps marketing teams visualize, understand, and build relevant connections with the target users.

Even if your SaaS product is aimed at a wide variety of users from different backgrounds, there are always common elements. User personas, also known as UX personas, are the characters which represent these common elements. 

Very often, businesses create one user persona to represent each customer segment that they serve. If you're unsure how to segment your user base, you can read this article, or you can work with a tool like UserGuiding that will do it for you automatically.

How to create User Personas

Creating detailed user personas is not an easy job.

You have to do tons of research on your real potential customers, gather the information you collected -ranging from the names, occupation, level of education, marital status to pain points-, 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 real customers, your product will continuously gain new ones.

PS: For more information on how user personas are created and the critical points of doing so, check out our article: How to Create User Personas.

Typical User Persona Examples + Templates

If you are new to creating user personas, these user persona analysis examples and some cool templates will help you at the starting point of your b2b 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 a 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. So, 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 be 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. The biggest question he needs to answer is how much profit he makes at the end of the month. He has to spend a long time to make an efficient analysis. And he quit 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. In addition, this product must give precise results and shorten the time he spends on managing the shop.

And here's a quick template example that can help you get the idea and create something similar, including John's detailed background information and characteristics. 

In this user persona template, I found at Justinmind, the John persona can be displayed via a quick impression of lifestyle, characteristics, and conditions with all the critical demographic data on the left side under a colorful, fun & engaging photo of the particular person - John in this case.

In this example, it's essential to appreciate the design that includes factors such as goals, motivations, and frustrations, all of which are extremely important to understanding and empathizing with the behavioral patterns of the persona. 

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, which 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 that will help its 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. Unfortunately, Catelyn neither knows how to code nor design, so she has difficulty 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 decisions to easily create what she has in mind.

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 easy-to-use user onboarding software. In that tool provided, she must not be expected to know how to code or create the designs for the customer onboarding flow.

And here's a great template example I think would align perfectly with the second persona we're examining: Catelyn.

This template created by Fake Crow would be perfect for conveying Catelyn's story since I think it does a great job grabbing the viewer's attention by engagingly displaying the main characteristics.

The bold, bright and vibrant color scheme manages to appeal to the eye from the first glimpse. It keeps the viewer interested by showing the persona's goals, frustrations, and motivations at the center combined with the graphical representations for a further overall look.

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 alone in her apartment.

Rebecca’s story:

Another persona analysis example is Rebecca. 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 to help her understand her statistics.

What challenges Rebecca:

Rebecca can use a camera and edit her own videos. She knows all the technical processes of 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. In addition, 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. Instead, she is looking for solutions to 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.

And here's a template example that would be very successful in showing Rebecca's story.

This template from Universe User Personas, pops up with a really cool shade of pink with white font in front, making it easy to look at and away from any confusion or disturbance. 

The large image for the given persona manages to grab the viewer's attention thanks to its placement, sizing, and clarity. Furthermore, I like how the template is straight to the point with a great graphical demonstration using icons, bar charts, and extensive numerical percentages. 

Persona 4: Phoebe, a UX Designer

• Name: Phoebe Miller
• Occupation: UX Designer
• Demographic: 42 years old, previously lived in Boston, Massachusetts, but moved to Chicago for a new job with the startup company. Has a high-income level. Married with three kids.

Phoebe's story: 

Phoebe is the UX Designer of a startup digital marketing company that aims to create an optimum interaction level with great marketing strategies between users and their product. Since an experienced employee like Phoebe is very much needed within this new organization, her boss has high expectations of Phoebe and her capabilities. Phoebe is aware that conducting user research is a significant step that will enable her to fulfill her responsibilities, but she's not given much choice.

What challenges Phoebe: 

Since Phoebe is new in town for this job, so she finds it extremely hard to conduct user research with limited resources. Even though she can gather and study various data, she's not given any directions, instructions, or proper resources within the new area of her work field. 

What Phoebe needs: 

Phoebe doesn't want to change her job one more time since moving around with her three kids is not easy. She wants a quick way to research with minimal cost since her company is just beginning to grow. She can easily go for online surveys, which are an inexpensive research method or try focus groups which are informal discussion sessions with users involved. 

And here's how I imagined her template would look like. 

This user persona template manages to stand out since it manages to blend everything perfectly into the deep blue background that radiates intelligent energy. *Ravenclaw vibes*

I really like how the template doesn't waste your time and gets right to the point instead, with the primary persona's goals, wants & needs, and pain points, which, in Phoebe's case, would be all about the confusion regarding the user research process. Also, it manages to make viewers remember the photograph and color together since they're both associated with each other and kind of colored along with the background.

Persona 5: Jason, a Regional Director

• Name: Jason Carter
• Occupation: Regional Director
• Demographic: 34 years old, single, lives in San Francisco but travels a lot, has a high-income level. 

Jason's story:

Jason is a regional director who needs to catch flights a lot. He sometimes has to 7-8 times a month for work purposes. His company has assigned Jason to a specific region so that he travels to the same cities and stays at the same hotels for convenience. 

What challenges Jason:

However, Jason finds this situation rather inconvenient if anything. He thinks he wastes the time he doesn't even have, trying to book flights or hotels out of many options. Also, being an introvert, he finds it frustrating that he needs to make phone calls, speak to tons of people or go through numerous websites and waste time.

What Jason needs: 

Jason needs a quick and easy process regarding his travel appointments. A site or a mobile app that would simplify the planning process of his travels would be excellent for him. That way, he would narrow down his options in just a few seconds and clicks and not have to carry his laptop everywhere with him since all he wants is comfort, convenience, and speed. 

And here's a slightly different template example that would do a great job demonstrating Jason's state of mind. 

Photographs of real people are indeed more likely to grasp the viewer's attention right away and boost memorability, but this vector user persona template has gone in a different direction and decided to stick with the power of cartoon sketch. The result? 

A fun, plain, colorful, easy-to-remember template to begin with. I personally find it very engaging in the use of colors and the font of the texts. 

As you can also see for yourself, the template has no room for unnecessary information, instead, it only includes what's critical. With plenty of visual elements, it manages to be appealing to the eye and the mind. There are progress bars that show the user's -Jason's in this case- interest and capability in different fields of technology.

Wrapping Up

We hope our user persona examples were useful for you!

As you can see from these five examples, you'll need to fill out your personas with detail and storytelling. This will ultimately help you imagine how your SaaS product can be used. 

To take things to the next level and start segmenting your user base into segments that match your persona templates, consider taking a look at UserGuiding. It offers an easy way to segment your users – without having to mess around with code.

‍Sign up for a free trial account today and have a play – perhaps it's something that can help you.