This is the first of a series of videos about personas. So, what is a persona? A persona is a fictional character that we create as a tool to help with product design.

A good marketing persona is specific. It has an age, a gender, a name, life goals, problems, all the things you would expect from a well-rounded character created by a novelist or an actor.

The difference is that we're not trying to come up with the most entertaining character we can imagine. We're trying to create a character that acts like a segment of our product's potential users. Hopefully, a big segment. So, even though they're fictional, personas are modeled on actual human beings who would use our product.

Because good personas are specific, we may have to create several of them to represent a full range of our product's potential users. Staples, the office-supply store, uses seven distinct personas to represent their website visitors. So, why would we want to create something like this?

A persona is simply a reference model to help keep product designers and developers focused on the end user and his or her needs. It doesn't sound like much, but in the last decade or two, personas have proven their worth.

In this series of videos, we'll talk about the "hows" and "whys" of creating personas, suggest best practices, Let's get started! Let's get started!