GPT Prompt Guides

User Personas

Product Management User Experience

In the legal technology space, I have a good sense of who the users are. In other industries, I’d start from scratch, applying my lightweight user personas approach and relying heavily on data while using my user personas template.

Many places have user personas, but they are often more fiction than research. It’s surprising how often previous user personas seem fabricated rather than data-driven.

AI Assistants might offer a better baseline than what most organizations have, making this a critical conversation about AI’s impact on user experience. The goal here isn’t final answers, but rather, to ask better, more informed questions, as Ha Phan put it so eloquently in a tweet years ago. AI Assistants can help generate better information for better questions because of the vast data used to build the models, albeit without some users’ permission.

With a trust-and-verify model, you can craft better user user personas.

However, my aim isn’t to start a controversy; I’m here to teach using the available tools. Let’s begin.

Suggest User Personas for the Domain

If you feel hesitant, I get it — this is what everyone is cautioning against. An AI Assistant could (and probably will) generate user persona that are flawed, and that’s kind of the point. This is a brainstorming session and no different than a bunch of people sitting around a table, which in many cases is just as flawed.

We’re brainstorming here, so just explore.

I find using generative AI to suggest user personas for a domain is beneficial because it can identify patterns and characteristics that might be overlooked. AI can uncover unexpected representations that may not come out of those brainstorming sessions that have preconceived ideas. It’s about expanding minds more than anything, and at least you can combat that one biased person in the room.

I’ll run the following prompt, with a focus on customer relationship management, to gather a list of user personas.

Prompt

Suggest user personas that would use a customer relationship management application.

Select a User Persona

Let’s start with one from above to understand this process.

This is about brainstorming for one, not the final artifact. They are one of the most misused artifacts designers and product managers create, so we’re going to be careful here. Alan Cooper, the inventor of user personas, has a great article about the journey that’s a worthy read and this article is based on his approach.

A good user persona should focus on goals, motivations, and behaviors because these elements provide a clear, actionable understanding of the user.

• Goals: Represent what users aim to achieve.
• Motivations: Surface the underlying reasons driving users toward their goals.
• Behaviors: Describe how users act to accomplish their goals, including past behaviors.

User persona template example.

By concentrating on these aspects, user personas are powerful tools for aligning stakeholders with user needs, fostering empathy, and ensuring that solutions are both relevant and effective. This focus eliminates unnecessary details that could dilute the insights, keeping the user persona practical and directly applicable.

We’ll start with the most basic of prompts with the user persona of: Sales Business Development Representative. Then we’ll include the goals, motivations, and behaviors in the second sentence of our prompt.

Prompt

Create a user persona for a Sales Business Development Representative using a customer relationship management application. Frame the user persona with goals, motivations, and behaviors.

Add Their Mindset

Run the prompt above and you’ll likely receive an excessively wordy response. Let’s get rid of that fluff.

A good user persona skips demographic details and focuses on background and attitudinal information because demographics often fail to reveal true user needs — age, really? Instead, understanding a user’s background provides context, shedding light on their experiences and challenges.

Attitudinal information, like pain points, captures their mindset and perceptions, which are crucial for tailoring the user experience. By honing in on these aspects, we gain actionable insights into how users think and feel, driving design decisions that resonate more deeply.

This approach keeps user personas relevant and focused, ensuring we design solutions that truly address user pain points and aspirations.

So, we’ll add in attitudinal information and background information, and we’ll skip the demographic information.

Prompt

Create a user persona for a Sales Business Development Representative using a customer relationship management application. Frame the user persona with goals, motivations, and behaviors. Include attitudinal information like pain points and background information. Do not include demographic information about this user persona.

Add the Task

Now let’s include research that almost never happens because it’s too much work to interview users this way: the task they are performing as a user persona.

Organizations use user personas in the abstract because they are a lot of work to create, so they only speak of them, and not to them. I’ve been in many meetings where we speak of the user persona but don’t actually interview users that match the user persona. If we do, it’s usually after the fact during usability testing.

When we specify the exact tasks users need to accomplish or the features they interact with, we create a direct line to practical improvements. This detail helps prioritize what matters most to users, guiding the development team to focus on functionality that genuinely enhances the user experience.

User personas are too abstract without including this detail. Including detailed tasks and features ensures our designs are grounded in real user needs and behaviors.

A task-based approach also turns the user persona exercise into an evergreen activity, refining them based on real research versus at the beginning of a project.

The task our user persona will be completing is managing accounts.

Prompt

Create a user persona for a Sales Business Development Representative using a customer relationship management application, specifically managing accounts. Frame the user persona with goals, motivations, and behaviors. Include attitudinal information like pain points and background information. Do not include demographic information about this user persona.

Trust and Verify

Asking user research questions to validate a user persona ensures it accurately reflects real users. This is crucial for user personas because they must match someone in reality. This validation process roots the user persona in actual data, making it a reliable tool for design decisions.

Skipping this step risks creating a user persona based on biases or guesswork, which can lead to misaligned solutions. In short, user research is the compass that keeps our user personas — and our designs — true to the real user experience.

We can easily do this with AI by adding to the prompt to ask user research questions, as we discussed in the last article.

Prompt

Create a user persona for a Sales Business Development Representative using a customer relationship management application, specifically managing accounts. Frame the user persona with goals, motivations, and behaviors. Include attitudinal information like pain points and background information. Do not include demographic information about this user persona. Generate user research questions that would validate this user persona as correct.