In this video, we're going to take the first step towards creating a persona, which, as we learned in the last video, is a tool to keep the focus of your website or app on your users.

Let's say you're building a website for a company called You've Got Fish. They sell tropical fish by mail. What's your first step in designing a persona to model users who want to use such a site? Already, we're a bit into the weeds, because there are so many different opinions about this.

Some believe that before you do any research, the thing to do is just quickly sketch a persona, using best ideas off the top of your head. Often, this is done with a group of developers, designers, managers, anyone with a stake in the project. Others recommend against including all of these people because there's a danger they may latch onto the initial sketch and have trouble discarding it once you've refined the design. Others say, don't do any sketching until you've done some valid research. But what the hell?

We're just going to take a stab at this because that's the kind of mad, impulsive guy I am. But let's keep this exercise limited to you and me to start with. We'll start with the basics. Age, gender, income. Those three things will tell you a lot about our persona right off the bat.

Let's say that he's 56 years old, Asian, male and makes, I don't know, $95,000 a year. So, why do we say that? Well, because you've talked to the owner of You've Got Fish and he doesn't have any hard data, but he's talked to a lot of customers over the years, corresponded by email and Facebook, and that's his impression, which is probably better than our impression. After all, what do we know about people who keep tropical fish? So let's go with it. And while we're at it, let's give him a name. We'll call him Herman. And there you have it. You've created a persona. Admittedly, he's a little thin and speculative, and I did say that a good persona is specific, didn't I?

So, clearly, we still have some work to do. Next video, we'll begin doing a little research to see how well our initial assumptions stand up. If we've done well, we can start filling in the details. If we haven't, it'll be back to the drawing board for Herman.