What is a persona, and why do they matter?
A lot more than you may think goes into building a successful website experience. Of course, aesthetics, content, and ease of use and function all matter. But meaningful, human-centered design starts with understanding the people on the other side of the screen. That is achieved by building personas.
A persona is a made-up person built from research, standing in for a group of actual users. They aren’t a real individual or a guess. They’re assembled from observed patterns, then given a name, a face, and enough detail for a team to talk about someone called “Carlos” instead of “users with high anxiety and family history.” We’ll get back to Carlos in a minute.
Without a persona, “the user” can become whoever the designer imagines in the moment, often someone a lot like themselves. A persona gives the team a shared, specific person to design for. “Would Carlos actually notice this button?” is a more useful question than “Is this good design?”
A good persona includes more than demographics. Goals, behaviors, challenges, influences, context, and relevant quotes help make the person useful to a design team. Comparing personas also reveals where users overlap and where their experiences may differ.
One Site, Many Users
A single site can serve many different people. Persona building helps you narrow down who you’re designing for, rather than an imagined average user who doesn’t exist. I recently did persona research for Heart.org that tested this idea directly. I built two personas: Jessica, a goal-directed persona built from information I already knew (because she’s me), and Carlos, a proto-persona that started with assumptions and then was grounded in research.
Building the Personas
Personas are more than simple bios. Goals, scenarios, motivations, and journeys are what make them useful. I intentionally built two very different primary personas around the same site. Jessica approaches Heart.org as a communications professional. Carlos approaches it as someone worried about his own health. The contrast is intentional because it gives us two different lenses to examine the same experience.
Jessica is 48 and a creative lead at the CDC who sometimes needs to go beyond CDC.gov for audience and research context. Her work in chronic disease prevention shapes what she notices on Heart.org. She’s comparing how another organization translates prevention into design, tone, and accessible language.
Carlos is a 52-year-old Mexican American and a senior logistics & supply chain supervisor who is recently experiencing heart-related symptoms. “I keep telling myself it’s probably nothing. I’m just out of shape. If something happened to me, I don’t know how my family would manage. I have to know what I’m dealing with.” Instead of wanting general, passive information, he’s arriving at Heart.org because of his symptoms.
Motivations, Barriers, and Journeys
Jessica’s motivation is professional: she’s looking for ideas, examples, and context she can bring back to her own work. Carlos’s motivation is personal and immediate: he wants to understand what his symptoms might mean and what to do next. His barriers are anxiety, uncertainty, and potentially overwhelming medical information.
Jessica accesses the site mostly from her work desktop at home, while Carlos uses his phone in private settings, whether on a break, in bed at night, or in his car after a shift. That difference matters. Jessica is browsing with professional distance; Carlos is searching with a much more personal sense of urgency. Pew Research found that, in its 2011 study, wireless internet users were more likely to seek health information online than non-mobile users.
What Real Research Added
Carlos shows how a proto-persona can develop through research. He began as an assumption: a 52-year-old man worried about his health and family history. As the persona took shape, I added details about his identity and used Heart.org research to inform his scenario.
On his journey, Carlos searches the web and finds a statistic showing that 53.2% of Hispanic men in the United States had cardiovascular disease between 2021 and 2023. The same statistic lands very differently depending on who is reading it: informative to a professional researching the field, personal and unsettling to someone reading about symptoms they recognize in themselves. That contrasts with how Jessica would read the same statistic as information for her work, not as something about her own health.
Mapping the Difference
Jessica and Carlos are intentionally very different: one approaches Heart.org with professional distance, while the other is personally invested in what he finds. But they are both plausible visitors to the same experience.
They are the two primary personas sitting within a broader persona family. Their relationship matters because the personas are not separate exercises. Together, they show how different people can arrive at the same experience with very different goals, motivations, and expectations.
If the team designed only for Jessica, the experience might prioritize the needs of a professional looking for information, examples, and deeper context. Carlos could encounter a site that gives him plenty of information but doesn’t adequately account for the fact that he is anxious, searching privately, and trying to figure out what to do next. Designing only for Carlos could create a different problem, potentially simplifying an experience that someone like Jessica needs to explore more deeply. Looking at the personas together makes those different needs visible.
The Real Takeaway
A website may have one homepage, one navigation system, and one set of content, but there is no single “user” experiencing it. Jessica and Carlos as personas illustrate that. Their relationship within the persona family shows that designing for multiple users isn’t about creating a different experience for every individual. It’s about understanding where their needs overlap, where they diverge, and where a design decision that works for one person might create friction for another. Ultimately, persona building protects a team from designing for an imaginary average user who doesn’t actually exist.
To dive deeper into the technical aspects of my review, view the PDF of my full analysis below.
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