Leveraging AI-Generated User Personas with Essense

Struggling to prioritize user needs and pain points in product development? Essense is rolling out User Personas, a feature that will take your feedback analysis to a new level.

In this blog post, we’ll talk about the role of user personas in product management and explore how you can use Essense for persona analysis.

_{What Is a User Persona?} 

User persona is a data-based representation of a particular type of user. Personas help teams understand and visualize the characteristics, needs, and preferences of their target audiences, making it easier to create user-centered products and address user pain points. With personas, businesses can tailor their marketing messaging, product updates, and user experience. 

By integrating user personas into your product management process, you can create products that are more relevant, user-friendly, and aligned with the needs of your target audience. 

_{How To Leverage User Personas in Product Management?}

Here's how you can leverage user personas in product management:

• Understand user needs

Businesses can use personas to gain deep insights into the needs and goals of different user segments. This understanding helps prioritize the roadmap and enhancements that directly address user pain points.

• Validate concepts and ideas

Personas can be used to validate new ideas and evaluate how well they align with the needs of your target audience. Persona’s requirements and expectations can shape your validation criteria and help you assess your market fit. 

• User-centered design

User personas help businesses prioritize user voice in product development. When businesses design user interfaces and experiences that align with the preferences of each persona, they can create more intuitive and user-friendly products.

• Segmentation and personalization

Every user persona represents a specific user segment, so you can utilize personas for refining your segmentation strategy. With more granular segmentation, you can deliver personalized experiences and improve user satisfaction. 

_{Essense User Personas}

User feedback analysis is the key to creating accurate, data-based user personas. Now, you can generate AI-powered user personas as a part of your feedback analysis with Essense. By applying NLP techniques such as sentiment analysis and topic modeling to your feedback data, Essense instantly identifies user personas with distinctive preferences, motivations, and behavior patterns. 

And the best part? To help you get the most out of your user persona analysis, Essense allows you to interact with them, dig deep into their habits and pain points, and get relevant quotes that highlight those issues. 

_{User Persona Examples}

Now, let’s see Essense user personas in action. As an example, we'll analyze App Store reviews for Storygraph, a popular reading tracker app. In under a minute, Essense analyzes all the reviews and generates 5 distinctive user personas along with insights regarding user experience, pricing, functionality, and feature requests. 

In Storygraph reviews, Essense identified the following user personas: Bookworm Enthusiasts, Book Lovers, Engaged and Supportive Readers, GoodReads Switchers, and Data Nerds. Each persona is accompanied by a description of characteristics that set them apart. By interacting with personas, you can find out how prevalent they are and ask them questions about their experience with the product. 

_{User Persona Questions}

Asking the right questions is crucial to gaining valuable insights from your user personas. Here are some topics you can discuss with your user personas and some question examples:

Goals and objectives

• What are your primary goals when using the product?
• How does the product help you achieve your objectives?

Pain points

• What is your biggest issue with the product?
• Can you describe an unsatisfactory experience with the product?  

Preferences and needs

• How are your preferences and expectations different from other personas?
• Are there any specific improvements you'd like to see in the product?

Behavioral insights

• How often do you use the product?
• What devices or platforms do you normally use to access the product?

Feedback on existing features

• Which features do you find most valuable?
• Are there any features that you don’t use?
• Can you suggest any improvements to existing features?

Competitor comparison

• Have you tried any competitor products? What do you think about them?
• Why have you switched from a competitor product to this product?

Satisfaction 

• On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend the product to a friend or colleague? 
• Would you recommend the product to your friends? Why/why not?

User experience & interface

• Do you find the interface of the product intuitive and user-friendly?
• Are there any parts of the user experience that you find confusing?

‍