https://medium.com/beakerandflint/personas-74c4e1c12ee2

The first thing a good UX Designer should tell you about creating a persona is that if you just blindly follow a template, you have missed the point. User research should inform the layout — don’t let the layout constrain the research.

Put simply, don’t just follow a template.

Sadly, this advice is not very helpful when you are starting out, staring at a blank sheet of paper trying to create a set of personas.

‘Isn’t making a persona a waste of time? What’s the point?’

Personas are all about building empathy amongst your team. Great software gets made when the people who make it care about the people who use it. That means during every meeting, when making any decision, in every design and with every line of code, you should first be thinking about your users.

This can be difficult to do: out of sight, out of mind. We are busy, we are in offices, we have deadlines, and our users are somewhere we are not. Printing out personas and hanging them on the wall is an excellent way to keep our users in sight and in mind.

Your users don’t go away just because you decide not to look at them.

So no, personas are not a waste of time!

‘Where should I start?’

Get out of the building (GOOB) and talk to your users!

There are lots of different techniques you can use, and I detail some of the key ones in a previous article here:

‘What should I put in a persona?’

To answer this question with a question: what is it about your users that your team should know, remember and reflect on every day?

To answer your question in a more detailed (and longwinded) way, I have put together this worksheet that I use to guide my research: