Pragmatic Personas: Putting the User in User Stories

When making choices about a system's functionality, the easiest thing is to ask yourself, "What would I like the software to do?" Unfortunately, when a team uses this approach, the result is usually constant argument, uncomfortable compromises, and that never-popular "designed-by-committee" feel. A persona is a simple model that describes an example user of a system. It's easy and fun for a team to create pragmatic personas that describe what we know about our users so we can talk about the product from their perspective. A good set of personas help us avoid the trap of self-referential design, and the act of building personas helps us identify what we don't yet know about our users. Jeff Patton shares the basics of creating simple personas and leads you through an exercise of creating one during class. Join Jeff and learn to write better agile user stories and identify characteristics your software must have to "wow" your users.