A simple change to familiarize your non-UX teams with your users
Ever since I learned and started creating User Personas for products I’ve wondered what are the most useful and efficient ways to have them integrated into development cycles.
Note that there are many ways to do this — print-outs, wikis, etc. which works fine depending on the context.
However, what I wanted was an additional way that wasn’t forced but accessible and constant. A method wherein a designer, an engineer, or a stakeholder can easily access them if they are unfamiliar with the persona or just be there and be present reminding the team who we are building the product for.
The solution is to create and link our User Story Issues (in Jira) to the relevant user persona. To review, User Stories are typically done in the following format:
As a user,
I want to be able to login using my phone
So that I can use the app while walking
With a minor tweak, inserting a link to your user persona, the story gives more context and accessible information for the rest of your team who are yet to familiarize themselves with who you are building it for:
As Martin Lopez — A Dog Walker,
I want to be able to login using my phone
So that I can use the app while walking
This is more useful for those who use Jira and Confluence (Atlassian’s Wiki) where the page title of the Confluence page is automatically recognized and rendered properly in Jira. This is a user story description displayed in Jira’s issue view:
I’m quite sure that other teams are doing this, however, I didn’t find a practical implementation and example so I thought I’d share this. Also, this method works perfectly because of the integration with Jira and Confluence but I think the general concept should still suffice for the intended goal.
