The past few months have been a crash course for me in completely new ways to approach product development strategy, and a good part of that has been the rise of User Experience and its effect on the process. My journey down this path started just before the new year, when my good friend Tom Daly took me through the development of personas. His group as HouseParty had developed personas of their ideal users, to help guide their development process. It didn’t take a lot of explaining to see the value of this – keep the users in mind as you designed the products and interfaces. Have a proxy for them, because you can’t have them in the room (nor would you necessarily want to).
One of the big obstacles in software development is the intelligence and technical competency of developers and programmers – meaning that when your users are developers, they represent a particular profile. Most of the people I’ve written software with these past few years are not the typical user, and that’s a problem. Someone comfortable from a terminal command line is going to have a gulf of experiential difference from that completely mouse-driven user, and even more from someone on a touch device. Dropdowns/select boxes in particular tend to be elements where developers think like developers, and not users. Not pointing fingers – it’s an observation, and my own development history is littered with plenty of bad examples, I’m not ashamed to admit. You do what you know will get a product out the door sometimes, in some environments. My hope is that going forward that won’t be a compromise we have to make anymore.
That’s what struck me with the idea of product development being focused on the user, but more than just “asking the user what they want”. Personas are developed as a result of interviews not just with current and (especially) prospective users, but also stakeholders within the business. This leads to a strong understanding of the business’ goals and the users’ goals, and allows the development and product teams to work within aligned priorities. Hopefully.
Let’s step back then. Having had the personas discussion informally, the next step in the puzzle was this article from 2008 by Jeff Patton. This helped crystallize not only the validity of Agile Development as a viable option for our next product iteration, but gave a path to how to reconcile User-Centered Design and Project Planning, with Agile User Stories, Scenarios, and Logic/Use Cases. After digging into this article and the associated powerpoints, I reached out to Jeff on email, and he graciously sent me some tips to move my efforts ahead.
The more I read about the kind of product development process that Jeff was advocating, and the more I tried to put into practice on a small scale, the clearer it became that you needed upstream pieces in place, or you were in trouble. You can’t do Agile development without a well groomed backlog (or XP, but that’s a post for another time). You can’t build a good backlog without defining a good user story map. You can’t hope to define a good user story map without knowing your users, which means doing personas, which you need user and stakeholder research for!
So – have you scheduled your stakeholder and user research yet?
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