What are buyer personas and what are user personas? Is there any difference between these two? At UXPressia (https://uxpressia.com) we wanted to answer these questions in our blog (https://uxpressia.com/blog/user-persona-vs-buyer-persona-difference) and here are some slides for SlideShare lovers.

1. with
USER PERSONA vs BUYER PERSONA
KEY DIFFERENCES AND WHY THEY ARE IMPORTANT
WITH

2. User Persona Buyer Persona
uses your product or service
directly.
makes the decision to purchase
your product or service.
Both are still personas so all persona rules
apply to buyer and to user personas as well.

3. Between a buyer persona and a user persona is that
a buyer persona isn’t necessarily a user. But they can be.
The main difference

4. A persona may buy it for their own use, so, in this case, they are
buyers and users at the same time. But what it they buy a computer
for their employee? Now they become buyer personas while the
employee is just a user persona.
Consider buying a computer

5. USER PERSONA
EXAMPLE

6. USER PERSONA
Description
• A user persona might not be a buyer.
• It might not even be their decision to
use your product or service.
• They may even dislike it but still have to
use it because of the management.

7. USER PERSONA
Goals
• Ease of use
• Flat and short learning curve
• They want something to make their job
easier, not harder!

8. USER PERSONA
Focus on
• Their skills
• Previous experiences
• Technologies they use or used to use.

9. BUYER PERSONA
EXAMPLE

10. BUYER PERSONA
Description
• Often a buyer persona is a number of
decision makers (especially in B2B).
• There might be end users among
them.
• They may be supervisors, managers of
all kinds, IT guys and even CEO. Each
of them has their own goals and
expectations.

11. BUYER PERSONA
Goals
• Buyer personas tend to have higher
level goals than users
• They may pursue things like high ROI
• Buyer personas may want to see how
your product will help them achieve
their strategic goals in the long run
• They may want your product to have
a flat learning curve so that it doesn’t
take forever for employees to learn

12. BUYER PERSONA
Questions
• How secure is your solution?
• Is it easy to integrate your product
with the existing infrastructure
• Does it require extensive support
once implemented?
With this variety of goals and questions
you might end up creating multiple
buyer personas.

13. KEY POINTS
vs.
• User personas focus on details such ease of
use.
• User personas may have influence on the
final decision.
• Skills and previous is critical when creating
a user persona.
• Buyer personas are more focused on
higher level goals like ROI.
• Buyer persona can be actually a whole
team of decision makers.
• Goals and expectations are critical when
creating a buyer persona.
They all can be both users and buyers at the same time.

14. AND FINALLY
But there is a great online solution you can use now
to create, share and export both buyer and user personas
Managing personas can be frustrating