Proposed Session:

Session Title: Putting the User Back in User Stories with Personas

Description: Have you met User? You know, the guy in “as a user, I want to…”?

The nameless, generic user that serves as the actor in many user stories does little to encourage empathy in your Agile project teams. Beyond that, it’s highly unlikely that all of the desires encapsulated in a project’s user stories would be shared by one individual. But when every story is told from User’s perspective, it becomes incredibly difficult to understand the value of each story so that it can be effectively prioritized.

Research-backed personas provide a powerful tool to understand the people for whom you are building a product, and they’re a natural fit for transforming User into someone to whom your team can actually relate.

In this session, I’ll explain how to conduct guerrilla research to create personas for your product, and I will outline the business and user experience benefits that come from allowing those personas to guide your requirements definition and discussion.

Leader(s): Will Sansbury

Will Sansbury is an interaction designer and certified scrum master in Atlanta, GA. In addition to helping the teams he serves to deliver outstanding experiences, he serves as an editor for User Experience, the magazine of the Usability Professionals’ Association, and Johnny Holland. He’s also an assistant organizer of Atlanta Content Strategy and serves on the council of the Atlanta Chapter of the Society for Techical