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Personas and User Stories Milestone

Due Date

Due Date: September 13
Grading: Team

Lectures

You must watch the Design Process lecture before working on this Milestone.

Description

For this milestone your group will provide a very short description of your project, at least 3 different personas, and several user stories.

Determine Users' Needs

Discuss the different types of users that you expect you will have, and how each one of them might expect or use different features in your app.

Meet with your Client or Users, if you have them

If you have a client who wants you to build the app, or you have identified a group of users for your app, then try to meet with them. Ask them what they do? (that is relevant to why they will use the app), why they want the app? how do they currently do the things they want the app to do? etc.

You want to understand how things currently work for them, what their pain points are, what they expect an app can do for them.

Banned App Ideas

The apps for this class cannot be ones for which the source code is available in many forms online. Thus, the following apps are among the ones that are banned:

  • Todo lists, and anything that is a "todo list plus X".
  • Chat, or including chat in an app.
  • All mini-games: snake, tetris, 2048, flappy bird, etc, as well as variations of these.
  • Classic games: chess, checkers, backgammon, etc.
  • Any app that is a collection of mini-apps or mini-games.

Specialize: Build for a specific audience

Find a small audience and build for them. Instead of a todo app for everyone, build a scheduling webapp for veterinarian offices, or a mobile app for birders, or an 8bit sound editor for music makers, etc.

Deliverables

  1. Add at least three personas to your wiki. These should cover 3 distinct user-types for your app. Each Persona must have a name, photo, and personal history.

  2. Add a "User Stories" wiki page with at least 9 user stories covering the most common use cases for your app. They should all be of the form: As <the name of one of your personas> I want a <feature> so that I can <satisfy a need>.

Grading Rubric

Do not make any changes to the wiki pages used for this milestone after the deadline. Wait until after you receive the grade for the milestone to make any further changes to these pages.

Personas

  1. Are there 3 Personas?
  2. with photos?
  3. with demographic information? age, income, education,
  4. with professional title? student, salesperson, physician,
  5. with other details relevant to your app?
  6. with a story? that exemplifies the persona's skills, feelings, attitudes, concerns, relationships ?
  7. with a goal(s)? as it pertains to using your app. That is, what does the user want (goal)? that you app will help in achieving. For example, Bob wants to get fit, so he uses our app to keep track of his workouts.
  8. Are the 3 personas different? do they belong to different groups of users of your app?

User Stories

  1. Are there at least 9 user stories?
  2. Do they reflect important part of the app's functionality?
  3. Is some important functionality missing from the user stories?