A user persona profile represents a subgroup of your target audience and serves as guidance for making product and marketing decisions. Audience personas humanize your user research and real data, to enable you to create more understandable representations of what your audience wants.

The exact information you include in your personas is very context-specific—it depends on what you’re looking to understand. Some information is always a must, like wants and needs, whereas other information, such as gender and location, can often serve little purpose.

Today, user personas are moving away from relying on demographic data. As we’ll explore later, this information leads UX designers to make generalizations about who someone is, and their needs. Demographic data gives us specific data, but not valuable data.

That’s not to say that demographics are never needed in your user personas—it instead means that you should really consider the value—if any—you’re adding with specific demographics.

Instead, modern user personas should include the following information:

Modern personas should understand who users are, as well as how they interact with and use your product or service. This gives a deeper understanding of how you can best go about improving your product.