Some products are used by many customers. Think of a website with 100,000 visitors a day. The idea of agile working is that you develop in small steps (incrementally) based on what you know. feedback from real users. If we collect sufficient quantitative feedback (measuring usage, heat maps, etc.) or qualitative feedback (for example with a tool like Usabila), we can base choices on this for the further development of our product.
Practice is often more unruly. For example, data is usually multi-interpretable. What do you do when 55% of the users are satisfied? And is not every user different? With your own wishes?
It can help to create personas for your customer groups. A persona is an archetype that represents the entire customer group or market segment. We come up with a real person who symbolizes the group.
METHOD
There are several ways to create a persona. Start * by splitting your customers into groups that all have the same profile and wishes. Preferably a maximum of 5. This is difficult enough.
To make the persona as real as possible, I advise you to provide at least the following elements:
- Name (often an alliteration such as Dirk the Director or Ingrid the IT specialist)
- Photo. Choose a (royalty-free) image from google that best fits the person you are describing
- Profile: brief description of people in work and private life
- What is going on in the persona: what does he or she think, see, feel and do?
- Problem scenario: what is he / she struggling with?
- Alternatives (which the persona now uses
Sometimes the customer’s wishes become so clear during this exercise that it is useful to immediately think up one or more user stories in the format ‘If… I want… So that…’.
EXAMPLE PERSONA
Under this link you will find the persona of Olivia from Oud-Zuilen (in Dutch). We regularly use this as a persona for the scrum cooking workshop. Oud Zuilen is the location of our training center. And Olivia thus symbolizes the inhabitants of this little village.
* Before you start, it is useful to ask the marketing department if they have already created persona. Or at least have mapped the customer groups.
Download the template (in Dutch)