Master this essential documentation concept
Detailed profiles describing the target audience for a product, including demographics, needs, and problems the product will solve.
User personas are detailed, research-based profiles that represent the different types of people who use your documentation. Rather than generic user types, personas include specific characteristics like job roles, technical expertise levels, preferred learning styles, and common challenges they face when seeking information.
When developing user personas, your team likely conducts extensive interviews, stakeholder meetings, and user research sessions that are captured on video. These recordings contain invaluable insights about your target audience's behaviors, pain points, and needs—essential components of comprehensive user personas.
However, when these insights remain trapped in hours of video footage, creating and referencing user personas becomes unnecessarily time-consuming. Team members must rewatch entire sessions to extract key details, leading to inconsistent persona development and difficulty sharing critical user information across departments.
By transforming your user research videos into searchable documentation, you create a centralized knowledge base where all persona-related insights are easily accessible. This approach allows your team to quickly reference specific user needs without rewatching entire interviews, ensure consistency in how user personas are represented across projects, and seamlessly share user insights with stakeholders who weren't present during the original research.
For example, when a product manager needs to verify a particular demographic detail about a primary user persona, they can search the documentation directly rather than scanning through multiple video recordings—saving hours of work and improving decision-making accuracy.
Documentation team creates content that doesn't match how different users prefer to consume information, leading to poor user experience and support tickets.
Develop personas that specify preferred content formats, learning styles, and consumption patterns for different user types.
1. Survey users about content preferences and learning styles. 2. Create personas with specific format preferences (videos, step-by-step guides, quick reference cards). 3. Map existing content to persona preferences. 4. Identify gaps where preferred formats are missing. 5. Create content roadmap prioritizing high-impact format improvements.
Increased user satisfaction, reduced support tickets, and higher documentation engagement rates as content matches user preferences.
Users struggle to find relevant information because the documentation structure doesn't align with their mental models or typical workflows.
Use personas to understand different user journeys and organize content around their specific needs and task flows.
1. Map out typical workflows for each persona. 2. Identify common entry points and information-seeking patterns. 3. Design navigation and content hierarchy based on persona mental models. 4. Create persona-specific landing pages or content pathways. 5. Test new structure with representative users from each persona group.
Improved findability, reduced time-to-information, and higher task completion rates across different user types.
Limited resources make it difficult to decide which documentation projects will have the greatest impact on users.
Use personas to evaluate and prioritize documentation projects based on user impact, frequency of need, and persona-specific pain points.
1. List all potential documentation projects. 2. Score each project based on how many personas it affects and severity of their pain points. 3. Consider frequency of use for each persona type. 4. Factor in business impact and strategic importance. 5. Create prioritized roadmap with clear persona-based justifications.
More strategic resource allocation, higher user impact from documentation efforts, and clear rationale for project decisions.
Documentation uses inconsistent tone and technical level, making it difficult for some users while being too basic for others.
Develop persona-specific writing guidelines that define appropriate tone, technical depth, and communication style for different content types.
1. Analyze persona technical expertise and communication preferences. 2. Create writing style guides for each persona or content type. 3. Define technical depth, terminology usage, and tone for different scenarios. 4. Train writers on persona-specific approaches. 5. Review and update content to match persona needs.
More accessible and effective communication that resonates with target users and reduces confusion or frustration.
Effective personas must be grounded in actual data from user interviews, surveys, analytics, and support interactions rather than assumptions or internal perspectives.
Detailed, specific personas with concrete characteristics and scenarios are more useful than broad generalizations that could apply to anyone.
While demographic information provides context, the most valuable persona details relate to how users seek, consume, and apply information from documentation.
User needs, product features, and market conditions change over time, so personas must be living documents that evolve with your user base.
Personas are most effective when they inform decisions across product, design, marketing, and support teams, not just documentation.
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