Personas are a design tool that help you group users into convenient cohorts according to their work objectives, tasks, needs, attitudes, skill sets, and behavior. Typically, user personas derive from behavioral and work process research within your business organization, and are often presented in a concise visual format to display the meaningful commonalities in each group. For example, the following figure depicts a sample HR worker persona configuration.

Personas and user roles are similar, but not the same. A user role is typically defined in terms of tasks to be done, while a persona creates a broader narrative to build user empathy, prioritize user needs, and align them to business outcomes.

For example, an auto insurance claim can include a customer persona and a Customer Service Representative (CSR) persona. The customer is stranded on the side of the road, trying to fill in an auto insurance claim. The CSR is taking the Customer's information over the phone. The Customer is likely experiencing a high-stress situation with limited access to information. Their goal is to get help as quickly as possible. The CSR working in the application shares the goal of assisting the Customer, but must also obtain accurate information to begin the claim process. The CSR is also in a different emotional state. While both personas share the main objective of filing a claim, their attitudes, demands, skill sets, and feelings are different and require different in-product experiences.

Understanding personas helps you gain a more granular level of control over the user experience, from defining which stages of a case belong to which type of user, to customizing the interface to include only the information that a specific role requires. You can create as many personas as you like, and use them as reference for building access groups in your application.