Personas are Great – For Wasting Time!

October 15, 2009 By

I’ve been meaning to write this post for a while. Recently, I saw a couple of blog posts on this topic (here and here) from bloggers I respect a lot. This spurred me to finally get around to writing this post.

This post is about using “personas” as a part of software requirements process. It’s not about marketing, sales or other activities.

At most companies, personnel with the job title of “product managers” or “business analysts” write Requirements Documents. These documents are then used by engineering teams to build and test the software.

There’s a school of thought that says that Personas are a very useful concept as a part of gathering and documenting requirements.

Having been a part of a few teams that tried to use personas in their requirements process – I consider personas mostly a waste of time. Here’s why…
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Filed Under: Product Management, Requirements Management, User Experience Design

Use Case Template and an Example

October 8, 2009 By

In a recent post, I provided a definition of use case as well as an example.

The example I provided uses a very simple format. In most real-world projects, teams find it helpful to use a more fully-dressed format.

In this post, I share a use case template in a fully-dressed format, as well as a use case example using the template. You can even download the template as a Microsoft Word file.

Alright, here we go…
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Filed Under: Requirements Management, Use Cases