Persona provides a vivid way for designers and product managers to understand the user and user needs pretty well. Also, it serves as an efficient communication media among team members. Nowadays, it’s widely used in the software industry, UI/UX design, and more other areas. I’m going to introduce you to some basic persona knowledge and list 18 free excellent user persona templates in this article.

1. What is User Persona?

It’s a comprehensive image of your real user, a typical representation of your ideal customer. It is generally based on user research and incorporates the needs, goals, and observed behavior patterns of your target audience. Also, it can play a role in many situations, including specific product strategy, design interaction, usability design, target users, discuss product demand, etc.

2. Why do we need it?

Before releasing a product, it’s crucial to figure out who will use and actually buy your product. A good user persona can help you figure out the subjective thoughts of what user needs, thus resulting in a useful product. Moreover, use it can bring plenty of benefits throughout the overall design process, including:

1) Good user experience.

Adapting user-centric design philosophy, your design and final result will meet users’ needs perfectly.

2) Reach agreement

A good persona sets a common goal for all members involved.

3) Improve efficiency

It can set a right and clear direction, making all efforts reach the expected destination.

3. Where can you get an excellent free user persona template?

Though you can follow Step-by-Step Guidelines to create your persona , most cases are that it still failed to satisfy all members of your team. Fortunately, there are plenty of sources on the internet accessible to you.

1) McorpCX Persona

McorpCX Persona provides a way to better understand the customers you serve. It has 15-year industry-leading customer experience practices based on personas.

2) Behance

There are a lot of examples out there of how to put together personas.

3) Fake Crow

Fake Crow is an excellent user persona example to generate personas for the user experience design process, branding, and marketing strategies.

4) Xtensio

It’s an online user persona template that covers 6 of the 7 Persona topics. Xtensio helps you come up with your ideal user “types.”

5) Marketergizmo

Marketergizmo covers all of the 7 most common Persona topics like Customer media & device preference and Biography and Customer Pain.

6) Market8

Market8 is a special user persona template that comes with a blog post where the impact of Buyer Personas on Web Design are described.

7) Hubspot

Hubspot covers all of the Persona topics but ‘Customer media & device preference and Biography’. It introduces the concept of what is Negative Personas.

8) The Buyer Persona Institute

It covers all of the Persona topics except for ‘Customer Pain’.

9) Akoonu

Akoonu provides good motivation to start a company and help marketers understand their buyers better. Moreover, it helps sales figure out if a buyer is going to buy.

10) Kula partners

Kula partners cover all of the Persona topics but the ‘Customer Image’.

11) Inflow

There are lots of templates out there for content gap analysis, many of which take into account personas and each stage of their buying cycle.

12) UserForge

This user persona template helps you start prioritizing design decisions and get to the wins sooner.

13) Personapp

It allows you to set up a simple persona in no time at all, and it includes options for easy sharing across your entire company.

14) Up Close & Persona

It contains various types of customers and companies that match with your business targets, and this persona tool will help create a picture of the most important customer types.

15) Buyer Persona Institute

The 5 Rings of Buying Insight are the most actionable part of the buyer persona. It clearly tells the behavior and demand of your buyers.

16) Fluid

Fluid was created to organize information in the Fluid Personas.

17) Content Harmony

It’s a free user persona template is easy to understand and gives you a compact, two-page snapshot of what a typical customer might look like.

18) Tony Zambito

It provides you all persona topics except the ‘Customer Demographics and Image’. It especially works for those master Business Model Generation canvas.

4. Some misunderstanding of User Persona

1) It is customer segmentation

They are not the same thing, just have common features. Customer segmentation is more applied in market research. And it generally based on demographic statistics like gender, age, occupation, and income as well as consumer psychology. It strives to analyze the behavior when customers buying a product. While the persona focuses more on the goal, behavior, and viewpoint of a customer.

2) It is a real customer

A real customer doesn't exist actually. We can not describe precisely what a user likes or dislike. Too many elements can result in different user preferences. What we need to figure out is the preference of a group of users.

3) It is an average customer

What we focus on is typical customers rather than average users. To create a user persona is not to reach a precious number that stands for the ratio of the customer. We do research of users’ needs and behavior modes to recognize our users.