Personas

Ficticious users of our product that help us develop our stories

In developing user stories for a product, it can be helpful to visualize one or more typical users. Sometimes we come up with a fictional character, and flesh them out with a name, backstory, etc. to make the user story process more vivid and interesting. These characters are called personas.

The software designer Alan Cooper phrases it this way: “Make up pretend users and design for them”.

This is typically more than one persona for a given product, since your product may be used by more than one category of person. For example, in a RideShare app, there are at least two different personas:

• The person offering a ride
• The person looking for a ride A third person might be the administrator of the ride sharing system that does tasks such as moderating comments, blocking users that abuse the system, etc.

Useful links:

• Personas entry in the Agile Alliance’s Agile101 glossary.
• Article with lots of examples of Personas from Alexa Blog
• 10 Tips for creating Agile Personas by Roman Pichler