This is part two on requirements for our blogging engine. See part 1 - the press release

We’re going to skip a few steps (The Research Plan, User Testing, Platform Audits, Competitive audits, amongst others) mostly because this project is initially only to scratch my itch and learn some new things. Also, there’s nobody else on my team. Those skipped steps are definitely good to take on larger projects. The design sprints after identifying the problem to solve are especially valuable.

I do find Personas and Job Stories useful for even ‘small’ projects. They help keep in mind other people that might end up using this in ways that are not my ways.

Personas

From The Complete Product Design Process:

To be honest, personas can be waste of time. For situational context, job stories are proven to be extremely effective (we’ll talk about this next). But when we need to identify multiple users that will be interacting with the same product in different ways, an afternoon proto-persona exercise is useful. We don’t always need to go as deep as identifying their shopping behaviors or making up fictional names for their 2.5 kids, but we do need to identify their objectives and behaviors.

Our personas for this project:

  • Owner/writer - Jennifer
    • Goals
      • Want’s to share her love of a certain kind of music
      • May want to focus on one genre/type
      • Wants to allow others to contribute to the blog, either through blog posts or reviews and comments
      • Wants to pull in specifics about a track/album
      • Wants to have private posts for certain kinds of members
    • Behaviors
      • Is technical enough to do a basic setup
      • Can either hire or design her own CSS
  • Reader - Bill
    • Goals
      • Loves music and wants to learn new things
      • Can visit regularly
    • Limits
      • Has low vision issue - needs assistive technology to read and interact with sites. Probably uses Text to Speech.
    • Behaviors
      • Loyal to a brand
      • Unlikely to write
  • Contributor - Inez
    • Goals
      • Wants to share her love of music and has a similar tastes to the owner.
    • Behaviors
      • Does not want to deal with servers so just willing to share.
  • Contributer/Reviewer - Jackson
    • Goals
      • Wants to learn new music and maybe share.
    • Behaviors
      • Loves the site, doesn’t want to blog, but willing to write reviews or at least just give stars.
      • Willing to ‘join’ at a premium level.
  • Reader - Medhanie
    • Goals
      • Wants to receive a weekly roundup email of all of the posts.
    • Behaviors
      • Does not like going to all of the websites.

Job Stories

Again from The Complete Product Design Process:

Job stories were popularized and blogged about by the good folks at Intercom. A job story is a description of a feature from a jobs-to-be-done perspective. It’s an effective technique for defining a problem without being prescriptive of a solution.

Our job stories for this project:

  • As Jennifer, I want to post a new blog post with associated track, artist and album listings.
  • As Jennifer, Inez or Jackson, I want to log in so that I can write something.
  • As Bill, I want to read the latest items.
  • As Inez, I want to receive all posts via RSS reader.
  • As Medhanie, I want to subscribe to recieve email updates
  • As Jennifer, I want to search through all of the content to make sure we aren’t duplicating things.


That’s probably enough to work with. Probably too much. We’ll see what we can bite off.