Chapter 7 Understanding the Real Problem
Persona
A persona is an invented personality; an imaginary but nevertheless archetypical user orcustomer for whom you are gathering requirements for your product. Why an imaginary
character when there are potentially thousands of real users out there? Because, for a mass-
market product, or one that is to be used by more than a dozen different people, you don’t
know, and can’t get to know, all of the real users. But you can know one really well, and that
imaginary user’s attributes guide your requirements: This is your persona.
You don’t invent your persona, but rather derive it from market research or other surveys into
your likely user population. The degree of precision needed varies in proportion to both the
size of the user base and the criticality of the product to be built. In any event, most teams
write a one- or two-page description that identifies the persona’s behavior patterns, goals,
skills, attitudes, and environment. It is also usual, and indeed desirable, to include enough
personal details—including a name—to make the persona seem real to you and your team.
You can, of course, have more than one persona for a product, but there should be one who is
the primary target of the product. We also find it useful to have a photograph—you can find
thousands of photos in the online stock photo agencies—and you select one that the team
agrees is their image of your persona.
Using a persona makes it easier for business analysts and innovators to think about their
customers’ needs. When they can see a photo and speak about the persona by name as
someone real, it puts a human face on what otherwise would be abstract data about potential
customers. The question to ask is not what a set of data wants, but “What does Emma [or
whatever you have called your persona] want?” or “What would Emma do in this situation?”
Personas avoid what Alan Cooper calls the “elastic user,” whereby different stakeholders
define the characteristics of the product to be everything they have in mind, and to
accommodate their own assumptions about the kind of user they are building for. The result is
usually too many requirements, many of which conflict with one another, and a product that,
by trying to satisfy everyone, satisfies none of its intended audience. Today you can see some
wonderful consumer products that fit exactly our own personal preferences. This is not
because the product’s builders know you, but because they selected a persona whose
attributes matched (more or less) yours. In contrast, if you try to write the requirements for a
product to suit everybody on the planet, the functionality would be so heavy as to make the
software too large to be installed on any known computer—trying to suit everybody will end
up suiting nobody.
Abstraction-At this stage, it may be useful to speak a little about deliberation. Reflection and getting to the substance are essentially something very similar, however conceivably deliberation is the more normal approach to consider this idea. The word has Latin roots—abs, which "signifies away from," and trahere, which signifies "to draw." Thus deliberation, as we utilize the term here, is drawing endlessly or expelling physical usage in order to decrease it to its fundamental attributes. At the end of the day, a deliberation is the real trick, not the usage. For instance of reflection, you most likely have a few of the accompanying media: CD, vinyl record, tape, iPod, internet gushing help, radio, MTV, DVD, etc. Each of these is a usage; their deliberation is music. Music is still music regardless of how you recreate it.
ReplyDeleteBy understanding the real problem you avoid situations like "I know this is what I asked for, but it's not what I need".
ReplyDeleteMost times clients don't know what they need. They may think they do, but after some investigation you'll notice the picture is not very clear in their heads.
So much money is wasted with systems that no one uses. To prevent situations like this from happening BA's need to understand the essence of the situation they're getting themselves into. It's just like playing detective, you need to investigate all parts, people involved and situations related to that problem. When you have a thorough analysis you can then really suggest what the real problem is!
Systemic Thinking
ReplyDeleteThe term "systems thinking" refers to a management and operations approach where single business decisions are analyzed based on the systematic consequences they have. If a company invests in a new computer software program, for instance, systems thinking leads to an analysis of the additional infrastructure, employee hiring and training and business delay costs that would result.
Systems thinking expands the range of choices available for solving a problem by broadening our thinking and helping us articulate problems in new and different ways. At the same time, the principles of systems thinking make us aware that there are no perfect solutions; the choices we make will have an impact on other parts of the system. By anticipating the impact of each trade-off, we can minimize its severity or even use it to our own advantage. Systems thinking therefore allows us to make informed choices.Systems thinking is also valuable for telling compelling stories that describe how a system works.