Building Effective Personas For Empathy

Is everyone in your organization aligned on who your customers are? Does your organization understand your customers? Since at least the turn of the millennium, businesses have turned to personas as a way to address questions like these. Personas are insights-based, easy-to-understand representations of a group of people, including their goals, needs, and behaviors. They likely exist in some form in your organization. But I’d hazard a guess that they aren’t living up to their full potential — i.e., eliciting empathy, helping teams prioritize, and driving human-centric decision-making.

The Challenges Of Creating Effective Personas

Why the disconnect? Most personas we see are based on outdated or ineffective practices, leading them to collect dust on a shelf. Companies succumb to pitfalls such as including identities that invite bias, overloading personas with irrelevant data, or using personas as the default audience framework when other tools (e.g., segmentations) would be a better fit. The good news is that these pitfalls are avoidable.

The Qualities Of An Effective Persona

Personas remain a powerful design tool in 2025 for brands that take an intentional approach to planning, building, and activating personas. This starts with knowing the qualities of an effective persona, which include being:

• Purpose-built. Personas should only exist when there is a clear “why” for creating them. Creating personas “because we need personas” is not a good reason. What will personas help your company achieve? Are you creating personas to improve experience design decisions? To align on priority customers across the company? Will your personas be used companywide to drive empathy and understanding or to inform very project-specific needs? The answers to these questions will guide who needs to be involved, what research you need to do, and what shape your persona artifacts will take.
• Insights-based. Personas are only as effective as the research that goes into them. While creating personas based on internal assumptions or the collective knowledge of the team creating them — referred to as hypothesis or proto personas — can be a useful exercise to identify research needs, you should never use these personas to inform decision-making. Instead, ensure that personas are based on a combination of qualitative and quantitative data.
• Goals-oriented. Unlike segments, which are based on quantifiable data such as demographics or psychographics, a persona is based on patterns of the user’s, audience’s, or customer’s goals, motivations, and behaviors, ultimately helping to enable empathy. Make sure this data takes center stage in your personas.
• Inclusive. Personas have the potential to cause bias and exclusion, so take one of several approaches to ensure that your personas are inclusive. You might shift away from assigning identities to personas altogether, instead using an archetype approach to visualize customer goals, motivations, and behaviors. If moving away from identities isn’t practical — perhaps because your personas are already rolled out — then take the approach of including quotes from a range of customers, noting specific factors in terms of diversity next to each quote (e.g., age, gender, abilities). Other approaches include showing a collage of identities or reflecting diversity across the persona set. For example, include a persona with a disability as a way of nudging employees to keep accessibility top of mind.

Unlocking The Full Potential Of Personas

Whether you’re getting started on your persona journey, updating your personas, or striving to unlock more value from the personas you have, start with the foundation of these qualities of a modern persona. When created with these practices in mind, personas can be the powerful empathy-building tool they were always intended to be.

Conclusion

In conclusion, creating effective personas is crucial for businesses to understand their customers and drive human-centric decision-making. By avoiding common pitfalls and focusing on purpose-built, insights-based, goals-oriented, and inclusive personas, companies can unlock the full potential of personas and foster empathy. To learn more about how to create effective personas and drive customer experience, register to attend Forrester CX Summit North America in June and explore the full agenda for the event.

FAQs

• Q: What is a persona in the context of business and customer experience?
  A: A persona is an insights-based, easy-to-understand representation of a group of people, including their goals, needs, and behaviors.
• Q: What are the qualities of an effective persona?
  A: An effective persona is purpose-built, insights-based, goals-oriented, and inclusive.
• Q: How can personas help businesses drive human-centric decision-making?
  A: Personas can help businesses drive human-centric decision-making by providing a deep understanding of customer goals, motivations, and behaviors, and by fostering empathy across the organization.