User persona
A persona generator that works from your research instead of around it. You bring interviews, tickets or survey answers; it builds the people your evidence actually supports, with the quote behind each claim, and leaves out the invented biography that makes most personas unusable.
- Asks for
- Your research — interview notes, transcripts, survey answers or feedback
- Who the product is for, as you currently understand it
- Gives back
- One persona per distinct pattern in the evidence, not a fixed set of three
- What they are trying to get done, and what they do about it today
- Where it breaks, and what they have already tried
- The quote behind each claim, and the gaps where your research says nothing
- Plan
- Free
What it gives you
The PM who inherited the board Evidence: 4 interviews (#2, #5, #9, #14), 11 support tickets. Trying to get done — Answer "are we on track?" without reading 200 tickets. #5 "I get asked on Monday and I spend Monday finding out." Does today — Keeps a parallel spreadsheet. Updates it by hand on Fridays. #9 "The board is the truth. The sheet is what I can show people." Not in the evidence — How they decide to pay for anything. Nobody was asked.
How it works
The reason nobody uses the personas on the wall is that they are fiction with a stock photograph. Marketing Mary, 34, enjoys yoga and hates inefficiency cannot settle a single design argument, because nothing in it came from anywhere and so nothing in it can be checked.
This builds the opposite kind: a persona made only of things your research shows. What this person is trying to get done, what they do today, where it breaks, what they have tried, and what they will not give up. Every line names the evidence under it, so when somebody in the room asks would they really, the answer is a quote rather than an opinion.
It also tells you where your evidence runs out. If nothing in your research says anything about how this person decides to buy, the persona says so rather than filling the gap with something plausible — which is the exact moment most personas start lying, and the gap is a research question worth writing down.
Who it is for
A PM who has done the research and needs the team to hold one shared picture of who they are building for, including the people who were not in the interviews.
Where it stops
A persona is only as good as the research under it, and this one will not disguise thin research as a confident person: with two interviews you get a persona that says it rests on two. It is also not a segment — it describes a pattern of behaviour, not a market you can size or a list you can email.
Questions people ask
Why not just use a persona template?
Because the template asks for the wrong things. Age, job title and a stock photograph settle no decisions, and the fields that would — what this person does today, where it breaks, what they already tried — are the fields a template leaves you to invent. A persona built from evidence can be argued with by pointing at a quote, which is the only reason anyone ever consults one twice.
How much research do I need?
Enough that a pattern appears more than once, which in practice means about four or five interviews, or a few dozen pieces of feedback, per kind of user. Less than that still produces something useful, but it will be labelled as resting on two or three people rather than presented as settled. The gaps it reports are often the more valuable half early on: they are the next round of research, already written down.
Can I have more than one persona?
Yes, and the number comes from the evidence rather than from a convention. If your research shows two genuinely different patterns of behaviour you get two personas; if it shows one, you get one, and inventing a second to fill the slide is how teams end up designing for a person nobody interviewed. Where a pattern is nearly but not quite distinct, it is noted under the persona it most resembles.
Run it on your own work
User persona needs an account, because it writes against what you give it and remembers what you have told it before. It runs on the Free plan. Or see what the plans cost first.