User stories are artifacts largely used to describe requirements in agile software development. However, the writing of user stories usually is focused on describing functional aspects of the software, leaving aside non-functional aspects as usability and user experience. This talk shows a practical experience of how adding aspects of UX to the writing of user stories.

1. Adding user experience
aspects to the writing of
user stories
By Luciana Zaina

2. Who I am...
• Researcher - Brazil
• Senior Lecturer - UFSCar
• Visiting Researcher - C&C
• Funding - FAPESP

3. What I am doing here...
• My project:
– Communication of User eXperience (UX)
aspects
– Agile team
– Case study
– Gaps: how matching the viewpoints of
UX experts and agile practitioners
... understand what are
implications and influences
of agile methods in the
organisations and
individuals.

4. Coming back to the seminar...

5. Objective
Adding user experience aspects to the
writing of user stories
• Practical experience was carried out with agile teams.
• We proposed a new form to write user stories by
adding UX aspects.

6. The context (1)
• ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) software industry: more
than 30 years of know-how in the development of ERP systems
– acting in different market segments: gas, construction industry,
manufacturing and others.
• Project: integrate UX aspects into the company software
development process
– adding suitable artifacts to support the integration of UX
concepts/techniques to Scrum.
– Scrum: is a collaborative Agile development framework.

7. The context (2)
• We have proposed other artefacts before.
• Workshops to promote user experience culture in their
day-by-day.
• There were two UX experts that worked on the design
of interaction and user interface
– They supported different projects and were not
dedicated to specific projects.

8. User eXperience and User Stories

9. Understanding
Practice
Deliberate
improvements
Implement and
observe
improvements
CMD

10. Case Study

11. Step 1: Understanding Practice (1)
• Ethnographic study:
– understanding the issues related to the writing of the
user stories
– observing the work of 5 POs (Product Owner) during
a week.

12. Step 1: Understanding Practice (2)
• Findings:
Mike Cohn template • Sometimes teams have difficulties in
dealing with the user stories
demanding extra explanation:
• User stories were described in a
brief way.
• There was no explicity connection
between the UX artefacts and the
user stories.UX
artefacts

13. Step 2: Deliberate improvements
and building artefacts (1)
• Step 1 outcomes + literature review + common UX
vocabulary
Mike Cohn template
Our 1st proposal

14. Step 2: Deliberate improvements
and building artefacts (1)
• Step 1 outcomes + literature review + common UX
vocabulary
Mike Cohn template
Our 1st proposal

15. Break in Step 2... (1)
Knowledge, skills and abilities:
Eric has been working for 8 years in the company,
researching by new technologies and tools for software
development. His degree is in Systems Analysis.
Eric Oliver
System Architecture
32 years-old
Goals, motivations and concerns:
He hoped to interact to system having a low effort for input
data.

16. Break in Step 2... (2)

17. Step 2: Deliberate improvements
and build artefacts (1)
• Step 1 outcomes + literature review + common UX
vocabulary
Mike Cohn template
Our 1st proposal
description of audience
positive impact on user interaction
X

18. • The 1st proposal was discussed among researchers, POs,
Scrum Masters and UX experts
Step 2: Deliberate improvements
and build artefacts (2)

19. • Warm up workshop entitled “Writing Interaction Stories” was
conducted with POs to become familiar with the new proposal:
– explanation of the concept of user story, personas and Nielsen’s heuristics
– presentation of the new user story template
– an exercise of writing
Step 2: Deliberate improvements
and build artefacts (3)

20. Step 3: Implement, observe
improvements and evaluate artefacts(1)
• POs had 1 month to write user stories using the new template.

21. Step 3: Implement, observe
improvements and evaluate artefacts(2)
H1 - visibility of system status
H5 - error prevention
H6 - recognition rather than
recall
H9 - Help users recognize,
diagnose, and recover from
errors

22. Step 3: Implement, observe
improvements and evaluate artefacts(3)

23. Final considerations
• The experience was based on a specific context and
domain.
– Company
– ERP
• Interesting results were the active participation of
practitioners in the building of the artefact.
• As user stories are a valuable artefact in agile
projects we intend to explore better ways of writing
them.

24. Thank you!
e-mail: luciana.zaina@open.ac.uk
UFSCar: lzaina@ufscar.br