A persona, (also user persona, customer persona, buyer persona) in user-centered design and marketing is a fictional character created to represent a user type that might use a site, brand, or product in a similar way. Marketers may use personas together with market segmentation, where the qualitative personas are constructed to be representative of specific segments. The term persona is used widely in online and technology applications as well as in advertising, where other terms such as pen portraits may also be used.

Personas are useful in considering the goals, desires, and limitations of brand buyers and users in order to help to guide decisions about a service, product or interaction space such as features, interactions, and visual design of a website. Personas may be used as a tool during the user-centered design process for designing software. They are also considered a part of interaction design (IxD), having been used in industrial design and more recently for online marketing purposes.

A user persona is a representation of the goals and behavior of a hypothesized group of users. In most cases, personas are synthesized from data collected from interviews or surveys with users. They are captured in 1–2-page descriptions that include behavioral patterns, goals, skills, attitudes, with a few fictional personal details to make the persona a realistic character. In addition to Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), personas are also widely used in sales, advertising, marketing and system design. Personas provide common behaviors, outlooks, and potential objections of people matching a given persona.