Planning User Stories: Starting with user roles

User Roles Writing user stories is an important aspect for understanding customer requirements. In agile, the focus of user stories are more than just writing about requirements but to also talk about them. Before you can start writing user stories, you must start with user roles. It is essential to know who to write the user story for. The initial requirements are gathered from the customer by the product owner. These requirements are often different from a traditional project in which it will focus more on  the user's experience rather than what goes into creating that experience. The best way to focus on user experience is to create user roles.

A user role is more than just a person and their experiences. It is a bundle of user experiences from multiple user roles. For example, a website could have a user role called visitor. The visitor would be considers a user role of someone who has landed on the site but not logged in. There could be another user role called customer that makes purchases from the site. Furthermore, a customer could be broken down into more user roles such as a standard customer or a premium customer. The bundle of user experiences is better explained when a visitor can be seen changing user roles. A visitor who has registered will now become a standard customer. A customer that wants more features from the website would upgrade to become a premium customer. One person was able to experience three distinct user roles based on what they wanted to do on the website.

In Agile, it is the product owner who creates all the user roles for the project. Creating user roles can be a rather challenging task because the product owner must understand the differences between user roles as they are created. The product owner would have to come up with bundle experiences on how someone would interacts with a final product. Questions that the product owner may ask themselves is what makes a visitor different from a customer? or is it necessary to divide a customer into separate user roles such as standard or premium? Tough question like these may not present a solution for the product owner. Sometimes it might be easier for the product owner to think about the context, character, and criteria of user roles.

Context, character, and criteria provides a means to breaking down user roles into much simpler bundle of experiences. Context is a person's experience based on their place in the website. For example, a standard and a premium customer will not have the same experiences as the context for each will be slightly different. Character is the experience that a person might expect during their interaction with the website. Lastly Criteria is experiences based on expected outcomes. Overall, creating user roles is the stepping stone that must be complete before writing user stories.

Work Cited

"Agile at Work: Planning with Agile User Stories" Lynda.com - from LinkedIn, https://www.lynda.com/Business-Skills-tutorials/Starting-user-roles/175074/387212-4.html Accessed 10 Nov. 2017.

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