The primary route we use to make sense of user behavior is behavioral personas. You may be familiar with cohorts based on things like date—all those users who signed up in January 2017, for instance. A behavioral persona is similar, but segments users out by patterns in how they use a product.

If you were analyzing a Gmail extension that checks the spelling and grammar of all a user’s emails, then you could imagine a few simple behavioral personas relating to usage right away:

• High-volume emailers: users who process many more emails than the median user
• Low-volume emailers: users who process fewer emails than the median user

You could expand this out to include people who write their emails very quickly, those who spend more time on them, the degree of broadness of the networks people have (whether they email many different people or just a few), and so on—behavioral personas are a very flexible tool.