Title: Designing Features Using Job Stories
Context: The closer designers get to actual customers the less valuable personas become.
Synopsis: The good ol’ persona. The abstracted, generalized, neutered version of the people actually using your product or service. Indispensable for…well, what exactly? Well, for trying to understand the person that you are supposed to be designing for. But if you have hundreds – even thousands – of users, how valuable can an abstraction be in determining motivation? The missing piece in most persona profiles, and all feature user stories, is context. Personas tend to whitewash the subject’s identity and rationale for competing a task, which leads to a sometimes vague workflow definition. Instead, shouldn’t we spend more time trying to understand the task – or “job” – people are working to accomplish and less time worrying about a theoretical framework within which to create solutions? I don’t know the answer to these questions unfortunately. Or to put it another way: When I try to understand the value of a persona I want to be sure that I am basing my decisions on real world requirements so I can stop trying to make a mannequin happy.
Best Bit: “Abstracted attributes and coupling implementation with motivations and outcomes are distractions for a team.”
via intercom.com
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