User Centric Design – the Who, What, Why and How of a Feature
At Pathfinder, we do our best to help our clients experience the software through the eyes of the user. Defining a feature includes explaining who will be using it, what they need to accomplish, why they need to accomplish it and how they’ll actually do it.
We start with personas (who) — they define the user base and let us identify the primary users whose needs we should focus on, which in turn drives the feature list. Personas also bring the human element into software development. Rather than using a vague term such as actor or user, terms that can easily be dismissed, we now have Myrna from Accounting, a numbers guru who is the primary user of the new software. Myrna is not so easily dismissed, especially once her needs and goals are identified.
We move onto user stories, all of which are written from the point of view of the personas:
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Anyone who has worked with developing the presentation layer for web apps has become quite adept at creating workarounds in JS and CSS to try and give the user the same experience in IE6 that they’d have if they used an up-to-date browser. However, because of IE6′s non-compliance with W3C Standards, a ridiculous amount of extra work (i.e., hacks) is needed in order to get the page to render correctly in this most outdated of browsers. And, as Dietrich mentioned in a 
Heuristic reviews are a great tool for finding usability issues in any existing interface, from web-based to desktop. It’s a quick and relatively inexpensive way to uncover, document and prioritize usability problems.
At some point in their career, most everyone in software development has encountered the client who paints a very eloquent picture about their fantabulous idea that’s going to revolutionize the [insert industry vertical here]. However, as time goes on you realize the client’s staying at the 60,000 foot level, and while that may make for great conversation, it’s less than ideal for actually developing something. The trick, then, is to get them to climb down into the trenches and define the details before you have to start writing the code.