Re: As a cyborg...

On 18 Dec 2024, at 05:23, Benjamin Goering <ben@bengo.co> wrote:

tbt 2012<https://www.tumblr.com/jacks/33785796042/lets-reconsider-our-users>

I'm very sympathetic to what Sarven is suggesting, and I admit I also sometimes do "as a user..." in a story title.

It can be hard to decide what to put there because sometimes a user story makes sense for more than one persona to want to do, and maybe with different '...so that...' rationale depending on the persona.

Perhaps it would be useful to brainstorm some common personas that should be served by this work.

Then, for any candidate user story, regardless of how it is written, we can ask: "Which of our core personas would enact this user story (and why)?". It could reduce the pressure on the story title "As a ___" to be able to map to one or more already-agreed-to common personas.

A good inspiration for personas may be this doc from the Mozilla Foundation / Knight Foundation collaboration on the coral project. (especially the last couple are funny) https://coralproject.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/20160304-coral-personas.pdf

Then, if someone finds themselves typing "As a user,", they can flip through target personas for inspiration on how to be more precise on what kind of end-user they are trying to enable.


I agree with this, especially that many stories work across different types of persona. And I like (and actually do follow) the idea of choosing the core persona for the storyline. Most often this would be something like "As a regular user (of an LWS-aware app)".

If the proposer can immediately think about more applicable cases, having them together is also fine (by using forward slash?). But I don't think that list / persona should be required to be exhaustive in any case, just like other things in the use case.

Of course, that leads to another related issue: what if two proposals are very similar, but differs by considering a slightly different persona or goal -- sometimes such proposals can be merged, but sometimes they can be very different and requires completely different (or even conflicting / competing) solutions. I don't have an answer, but am happy to hear suggestions (I can open a separate thread if there is no established guidance for this and that applies).



Rui Zhao
Post-doc @ EWADA -- Ethical Web And Data Architecture in the Age of AI
Human-Centred Computing, Dept. of Computer Science
University of Oxford
https://me.ryey.icu