user-persona

A LaTeX package for typesetting structured user persona sheets in UX and HCI documentation.

What Is a User Persona?

A user persona is a fictitious but research-grounded representation of a target user group, synthesising observed behaviours, goals, and frustrations into a named, humanised archetype Cooper 1999. Personas are widely used in user-centred design to keep real user needs visible throughout product development — from early requirements gathering through to final evaluation Pruitt & Adlin 2006. They serve as a shared vocabulary between designers, developers, and stakeholders, anchoring design decisions in empirical user research rather than internal assumptions Nielsen 2019.

Cooper 1999 A. Cooper, The Inmates Are Running the Asylum. Sams Publishing, 1999.

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Pruitt & Adlin 2006 J. Pruitt and T. Adlin, The Persona Lifecycle: Keeping People in
Mind Throughout Product Design. Morgan Kaufmann, 2006. ISBN: 978-0-12-566251-2

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Nielsen 2019 L. Nielsen, Personas — User Focused Design. Springer, 2019.
doi:10.1007/978-1-4471-7427-1

About This Package

The user-persona package provides a structured persona environment and a set of commands for composing professional persona sheets directly in LaTeX. It is intended for UX researchers, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) practitioners, and product designers who maintain documentation within a LaTeX workflow.

Unlike the persona_landscape document class from Holzinger et al. (2022) — which targets AI-specific personas in medical contexts and requires a directory of external PDF image assets — user-persona is:

• A composable package (\usepackage), not a document class: integrates into any existing document (thesis, report, CHI paper, design brief) without replacing its root class.
• Domain-neutral: suitable for any UX, product, or service design context.
• Self-contained: no external PDF theme assets required.
• Released under LPPL-1.3c for full CTAN distribution.

Quick Start

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{user-persona}

\begin{document}
\begin{persona}{Zhang Wei}
  \personaphoto{photo.jpg}
  \personaquote{``If the robot crashes, I reboot it and send a WeChat voice note.''}
  \personafact{Age}{30}
  \personafact{Location}{Mainland China}

  \personasection{Goals}{PersonaGreen}{
    \item Complete the shift with zero system failures.
    \item Find content to combat boredom during monitoring.
  }

  \personasection[right]{Pain Points}{PersonaRed}{
    \item Physical strain from 10 hours of screen glare.
    \item Frustration with text-heavy Western software interfaces.
  }
\end{persona}
\end{document}

See user-persona-example.tex for a minimal example and user-persona-detailed.tex for a full demonstration.

Commands

Environment

\begin{persona}{Name} ... \end{persona}

Identity

Content Cards

pos accepts left, right (default), or span.

Inline Elements

Predefined Colours

Related Work

Holzinger et al. (2022) provide a LaTeX document class (persona_landscape) for AI-specific persona sheets, released under CC BY-NC 4.0 as a GitHub repository. The user-persona package addresses a complementary but distinct need: a general-purpose, composable, CTAN-distributed package for UX and HCI documentation workflows.

A. Holzinger, M. Kargl, B. Kipperer, P. Regitnig, M. Plass, and H. Müller,
"Personas for Artificial Intelligence (AI): an Open Source Toolbox,"
IEEE Access, vol. 10, pp. 23732–23747, 2022.
doi:10.1109/ACCESS.2022.3154776

License

Released under the LaTeX Project Public License, version 1.3c (LPPL-1.3c).

Contributing

Github: uses a Nix flake to provide a fully reproducible development environment.

Enter the development shell:

nix develop

This provides tectonic, chktex, ctanify, and reuse on your PATH.

Build the CTAN bundle:

build-ctan

This will:

1. Compile all documentation PDFs via tectonic
2. Lint user-persona.sty via chktex
3. Produce user-persona.tar.gz via ctanify --no-tds

Check SPDX licence headers:

reuse lint