Requirements Engineering with Personas

In the chaotic circus of software development, nailing a project often boils down to just one thing: really getting your users. Because let’s face it, without that understanding, you’re just juggling code and hoping for applause.

Requirements engineering is critical in translating project visions into actionable tasks. One tool that stands out in this domain is the persona. Understanding and implementing personas can significantly enhance project outcomes, especially for project managers and business analysts.

Introduction to Requirements Engineering

RE is all about collecting, documenting, and herding those stakeholder needs like cats, ensuring the final product ticks all the right boxes. Think of it as the essential ingredient for nailing down the scope, budget, and timeline—because your developers won’t be too happy about another weekend in the (home-)office to fulfill the most important customer wishes - that surfaced about two days before the deadline.

This process lays the groundwork for everything else, proving that without it, you might as well be trying to code in the dark. So, let’s tip our hats to requirements engineering—keeping chaos at bay one requirement at a time.

The Importance of Personas in Software Development

Personas are fictional characters created based on real data to represent the different user types that might interact with a system. They help teams understand the needs, experiences, behaviors, and goals of their users. Personas are like the secret sauce that turns abstract requirements into real-world user needs by adding a human touch. They help bridge the gap between theory and practice, making the process graspable - by putting a face on the (potential) users.

Personas provide a clear focus for development teams, ensuring that the end product resonates with its intended audience. When used effectively, personas can drive more intuitive design decisions, leading to improved user satisfaction and project success.

Creating Effective Personas

Creating personas is like assembling a jigsaw puzzle with research, creativity, and a sprinkle of strategic thinking. Here are some best practices to guide you.

1. Conduct Thorough Research:

• Gather data from surveys, interviews, and usability tests.
• • For instance, if a company wants to improve its mobile app, it would start by collecting data through various methods. They might conduct surveys to gather user opinions and preferences, hold interviews to get in-depth feedback from select users, and perform usability tests to observe how people interact with the app. This comprehensive data collection helps the company understand user needs and make informed decisions to enhance the app’s functionality and user experience.
• Analyze user demographics, behaviors, and motivations.
• • Picture this: you’re developing a fitness tracking app. By examining user demographics, you learn that a significant portion of your users are health-conscious millennials. Next, read their behaviors—via app usage patterns, you discover they prefer quick, engaging workout sessions. So, you’ve uncovered their motives: they’re juggling a chaotic work-life balance while trying not to become a couch potato. Enter your app, ready to dish out workouts that are both efficient and fun.
• Look for patterns and commonalities among your users.
• • Once you’ve gathered heaps of user data, it’s time to channel your inner detective and start spotting those patterns. Think of it as a digital Easter egg hunt. Spotting shared frustrations or common goals among users? Those are your neon signs pointing to what really counts. So, 80% of your feedback shows users are repeatedly rage-clicking the same button? Might be a clue that its function needs some clarity. Spotting these trends helps you craft personas that aren’t just cartoonish guesses but actually mirror real user experiences. The aim is to turn these insights into personas that steer your team toward crafting solutions users didn’t even know they needed—but will totally love.

2. Build Detailed Profiles:

• Provide details about a person’s demographic characteristics, such as age, gender, or ethnicity, along with their job role or occupation.
• • Additionally, include information about their personal background, which may cover education, experiences, and interests. (Jane, 28, … see example below)
• Highlight key goals, challenges, and pain points.
• • In a fitness app, highlighting key goals might involve setting targets for users to achieve, such as running a certain distance or losing a specific amount of weight. Challenges could include finding time to exercise regularly or overcoming a plateau in progress. Pain points may be user frustrations like complicated navigation or insufficient tracking features. Addressing these aspects helps create a more effective and user-friendly app experience.
• Use real quotes and anecdotes to add authenticity.
• • To add authenticity to your fitness app personas, incorporate real quotes and anecdotes from actual users. For instance, if creating a persona named “Active Amy,” you might include a quote from an actual user like, “I love how the app keeps me motivated every morning,” or share a brief story of how the app helped someone achieve a personal fitness goal. This approach makes the personas more relatable and credible.

3. Validate with Stakeholders:

• Share your personas with team members and stakeholders.
• • You will see if those are the right personas by discussing them with your most important stakeholders. They might change their way of seeing things through this.
• Ensure they align with the project’s objectives and user needs.
• • Well, Aunt Erna may be visiting and also be the best persona, but if she is not your main buyer, be sure to give her the corresponding weight in your decisions.
• Revise based on feedback to enhance accuracy.
• • But don’t fall for the “Loud Ones” - only if you hear a certain request often does not really mean that this is the majority. (Hint: Read Lizard Optimization, https://leanpub.com/lizardoptimization, for more about outliers and how to build for them).

An Example Persona for a Fitness App

Meet Jane Doe, your quintessential millennial fitness enthusiast. She’s a 28-year-old marketing executive living in a bustling city and perpetually walking the tightrope between her career and personal life. Armed with a bachelor’s degree in communications and a penchant for digital marketing, Jane is all about efficiency — whether it’s in her work, workouts, or morning coffee routine.

With her jam-packed schedule, Jane’s a fan of workout routines that are quick and efficient—think cardio meets strength training for max results in those oh-so-precious minutes (probably a HIIT girl). When she’s not crunching numbers, she’s a weekend warrior pounding the pavement in marathons, often raising funds for her favorite furry pals at animal shelters.

Her interests don’t just stop at workouts; she’s also passionate about gourmet cooking, travel photography, and devours podcasts on everything from business to comic book lore. By understanding these facets of Jane’s life and motivations, the fitness app can try to tailor its features to meet her needs, offering compact, intense workouts and integrating motivational challenges that align with her interest in philanthropy, thus delivering an experience that Jane is bound to endorse enthusiastically. Of course, we most likely don’t want to overdo it and create a kitty-themed workout app because we fell in love with the non-existing Jane.

Personas in Requirements Engineering

In requirements engineering, personas serve as a compass, guiding teams through the complexities of user needs and technical constraints. They help prioritize features, streamline decision-making, and align the development process with user expectations.

What do they do

1. Enhancing Communication:

• Personas act as a universal language, fostering better communication between cross-functional teams.
• They help bridge the gap between technical and non-technical stakeholders.

2. Prioritizing Requirements:

• Personas highlight the most critical user needs, helping teams focus on high-impact features.
• They aid in resolving conflicts and making trade-offs when resources are limited.

3. User-Centric Design:

• By keeping personas in mind, teams can design solutions that resonate with users.
• Thi can lead to higher user satisfaction and reduced churn rates.

How Personas Improve Project Management and Business Analysis

For project managers and business analysts, personas offer a structured approach to tackling complex projects. They provide clarity, reduce ambiguity, and ensure that every decision is user-driven.

Strategies for Implementation

1. Incorporate into Project Plans:

• Integrate personas into project charters and requirement documents. Call them by the names they have and discuss them like they are your friends (or: enemies. can’t like everyone).
• Use them as reference points during project reviews and retrospectives.

2. Facilitate Stakeholder Buy-In:

• Present personas in stakeholder meetings to highlight their relevance. It really makes a difference if you can say “But think of Hermione. She’d love to do all the possible tests to make sure she is ready for the next training. And think of Ron, he’d forget that appointment for sure.”
• Use visual aids and storytelling techniques to make personas relatable. A picture, even ai-generated, helps to visualize that persona.

3. Drive Continuous Improvement:

• Regularly update personas based on new user data and feedback. Maybe the time where Harry loved your app is over, now he’s landed Ginny and is the Lead of the Aurors.
• Use them to identify gaps and opportunities for improvement.

Implementing Personas

Implementing personas requires a strategic approach and the right tools. Here are some practical strategies to get started:

1. Tools and Resources:

• Utilize persona templates (Figma: https://www.figma.com/community/file/881830156311997001)
• Leverage collaboration tools like Miro (or storywise ;)) for team alignment.

2. Training and Workshops:

• Conduct training sessions to educate teams on persona creation and usage. Don’t overdo it, nobody wants to sit in a 2h “this is a persona” workshop. 15 Minutes should be enough to get people on board, use the rest of the time to experiment with them.
• Organize workshops to co-create personas with cross-functional teams. You are not the user, and your personas are not “the” personas. But together with others, you might find the right ones.

3. Documentation and Accessibility:

• Document personas in a central repository accessible to all team members. They are not your secret to keep ;)
• Ensure that personas are easily retrievable and updated regularly.

Measuring Success

To gauge the effectiveness of persona-driven development, it’s essential to establish metrics and track progress regularly.

Metrics for Persona-Driven Development

1. User Engagement:

• Monitor user interaction metrics like session duration and page views. If you can somehow map some users to different personas, even better. Overall data also helps.
• Track user feedback and satisfaction scores. Use tools that provide you with small feedback forms like https://github.com/Ryczko/FormsLab. Keep it short. The longer you go, the less thoughtful the answers get, and trust me, the fewer responses you’ll receive. Brevity is your best friend!

2. Conversion Rates:

• Measure the impact of persona-driven design on conversion rates. Of course, this is high level. Not everyone can distinctly see what design change gets which conversion rates. But still, if you have any possibility of A/B testing, do it.
• Analyze the correlation between persona alignment and business outcomes. Not every happy persona makes the business owners happy. ;)

3. Efficiency and Productivity:

• Assess the impact on development timelines and resource utilization. It may be fulfilling to make Donald Duck happy, but as we know, he’s always tight on the money, so we better prioritize someone who can give it away too.
• Track the reduction in rework and project delays. Sometimes development speed isn’t even the problem anymore - the problem is to build the right thing.

Conclusion

In conclusion, personas are a powerful tool in requirements engineering that can transform the way projects are managed and executed. By bringing the voice of the user into every phase of the development process, personas ensure that the final product is not only functional but also delightful to use - for the right people (not the CEO).

…and storywise?

What does this have to do with storywise? Well, we started because we wanted to make the requirements engineering process better. In storywise, we currently do not support personas, only roles - think of a group of personas, and what they’d like. However, it’s easy to keep them in mind anyway ;) You can see (in the interface or in the docx export) which user stories are linked to which role, and see them listed by the role. That way you can make sure you target your user stories correctly!

Written by Simon Jiménez, 2024