Expert tips for user persona design in a user story map. - Where to start with user personas? - Type of user personas - Expert tips from UI/UX designers - How do user personas help with prioritization and release planning? - User persona examples

1. For user persona design in user story map
EXPERT TIPS
How to design user personas
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2. Type of user personas in story mapping
Not all user personas are created the same way. UI/UX designers identify 4
different types based on the objective and the amount of previous research
done. None of them is the ultimate go to type, you may need all of them at
different stages of product development.
Where to start with user personas?
Understanding users’ needs, wants and journey’s is key to build great
products, but it may as well be the hardest part.
User persona design has been a steady component of product
development to help dev teams empathise with users.
Agile teams can easily loose focus on user journeys and tend to fixate
on story points. This is when the role of the Product Owner becomes
critical who can help to keep a user-centric approach, using user
personas in story mapping.
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3. StoriesOnBoard.com
Type of user personas in story mapping
Role-based personas are based on what role a given user occupies
within the organisation. For instance, executives and managers are
going to use tools differently than the dev team and they very often
need a different user persona based on their role.
Role-based personas
Type B
Channeling the best of the above mentioned two approaches, you can
design engaging personas. The goal is to build a persona that feels very
close to real for the whole team so that as many people engage with
your persona as possible. Engaging personas should be built with the
emotions and psychology of the user in mind, have something about
their background so that you can have a deeper understanding of their
goals. Engaging personas are the most helpful with evoking empathy.
Engaging personas
Type C
Fictional personas are based on assumptions of previous experience
with users. When a design team makes a hypothesis of what a specific
persona might or might not want to achieve, we call them fictional
personas. Keep in mind that these types of personas can be very
wrong and should always be researched deeply before using them in
user story maps. As Jeff Patton also emphasises “You are not your
user”. Don’t fall into the trap of self-substitution.
Fictional personas
Type D
Goal-directed personas are short, straight to the point. They answer a
simple question: What does the user want to achieve with this
product? Goal-directed personas are usually short descriptions, relying
on facts mainly. It’s advised to use this type when you have already
done plenty of research on your users and have a very good
understanding of them. This type doesn’t evoke empathy per sé,
therefore, teams who can fill in the blanks can benefit from it the most.
Goal-directed persona
Type A

4. Expert tips from UI/UX designers
Steps of the product discovery with JIRA
Don’t just ask users what they want – Rely on data-driven user persona
research.
Good persona is built from good data, not from mindless brainstorming.
Many dev teams fall into the trap of asking users what features they
would like to see on the product and simply follow their wishes.
Where does that lead to?
Without a clear understanding of your users, you’re likely to find
yourself in a feature competition and loose (or never reach) your
competitive advantage. Users are no experts in UX research and often
miss to see the big picture.
Make sure to rely on data when creating user personas and try to filter
out the guesses as much as possible.
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What can be considered as research?
Research doesn’t have to look super
scientific. Spending time talking to users and
watching them use your product is already
very valuable research. Make sure to always
include observing users in your research
phase or best if you continuously do so.
User persona research and development of archetypes should always
precede user story mapping. Vague statements should follow careful
research, not precede it, such as the one essential for user story
mapping:
“As a _____, I want _____ so that I can_____.

5. How many personas should we have on a story map?
Prioritization is also matter when it comes to the number of user
personas. You need to have a fix number in mind when deciding on how
many personas you’ll want to build for a single user story map.
Once you’ve brainstormed on all types of personas that might use your
product, rank them from most to least critical. Every persona should
have a good reason why to include it, if it won’t affect the final design,
get rid of it.
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A typical software product will have
between 3 to 10 personas, a good story
map should have fewer than that.
However, when mapping, you should
always have a single persona in focus,
otherwise, you’ll want to meet every
single requirement of each persona,
which is impossible.
How do user personas help with prioritization and release planning?
Steps of the product discovery with JIRA
Give the best possible experience to your persona in focus. Especially,
when you’re building an MVP, you don’t have the luxury of including all
possible users. Prioritization is king.
Walking through each persona on the story map and identifying
individual user stories and gaps in the story map is key, but you’ll have
to be able to prioritise user stories that will need to be included in the
MVP.

6. What happens when your personas are organizations?
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Organizational profiles can also work as personas. Jeff Patton calls
these “orgzonas”. These personas tend to be much more “fact-heavy”
and have fewer fictional elements. Research is much more complex
because users and decision makers are not the same person. Even if
you design your product with the user in mind, you’ll have to factor in
other stakeholders.
Find the balance between fact and fiction
Fictional details can be very helpful, but if you overdo them, it’ll lead to
fictional personas. Rely on facts of a thorough persona research and
only fill in the ‘blanks’ with fiction such as likes and dislikes, hobbies of a
character. These small details will help your team put themselves in the
persona’s shoes, but won’t lead them to false conclusions.
How to build user personas in
StoriesOnBoard that will assist you
with building a great product?
StoriesOnBoard supports pragmatic
user persona creation used by most
agile teams. For all types of personas
identified as critical, pick a custom
icon that best describes them and
fill in their profiles. You can create
persona groups based on job roles,
archetypes etc.
In the StoriesOnBoard app, you
can add personas to both epics and
individual story cards so that you can
map user journeys and potentially
identify gaps in user stories more
easily.

7. Tip from StoriesOnBoard : One persona - one user journey
Assigning a new persona to every
different user journey can be a
good idea if you have multiple user
journeys such as “impulse shopper”,
“researcher”, “discount chaser”,
“fashionable diva” or “last minute
shopper”.
This way you’ll evidently use
personas to map individual user
journeys on your user story map.
Identifying user journeys becomes
significantly easier if you can filter
them by personas.
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Generate & update website content
(products, content, promotions)
Work with agencies to build traffic &
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Monitor key performance indicators
on the website and develop plans to
improve them
Hi, I’m John.
I’m an E-commerce website administrator.
Intuitive & easy to use application
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Great reporting features
JOHN’S NEEDS & GOALS
User Persona Example

8. Visit us for User Story Mapping best practices
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