From Developing Personas to User Stories

During Week 2, you learned how to develop personas, problem scenarios, and alternatives using best practices from design thinking. This is important because the best way to avoid building something nobody wants is to start with somebody in mind. That “somebody” is a persona.

During Week 3, you’ll be learning how to create software that meets users’ need. That begins with understanding that user–and user stories are a tool that helps teams understand the end-user perspective. The agile user story is the focal point for just about everything that follows. This is where we diagnose what we think we should do for the user and why, and how we’ll know if we did something relevant (or created waste). During this week, you’ll learn how to conduct effective, efficient discovery, from creating an interview guide to interviewing users. You’ll finish with creating Google AdWords-ready copy and drafting your personas, problem scenarios and alternatives.