User Stories or Persona-Based Design?

When designing websites, apps, or web services in general, User-Centred Design is clearly paramount. Technology, design, and marketing jointly define the respective requirements during the conceptualisation phase. The challenge lies in developing all project goals together.

Because no matter how beautiful the design, if the user cannot find their way around or takes too long to achieve their goal, it won't be long before they’re gone. We therefore look for workflows during the conceptualisation phase that recognise and define user intentions. In doing so, we have worked with both user stories and personas.

Efficient Process Through User Stories

While we preferred personas a few years ago, today we primarily work with user stories. A user story describes user behaviour, meaning what the application must be able to do when the user wants to perform an action. Possible scenarios are played through, and user actions are analysed. It is crucial that this is kept free from technical gimmicks. User-friendliness is clearly paramount when creating user stories, because user stories can help achieve quick and easy website usage.

Working with user stories also allows for greater efficiency in the design process, because if all necessary functions have been clarified in advance, it is unlikely that an essential function will be forgotten, thus requiring the design to be revised or reconfigured.

The most significant advantage is probably good communication between designer and developer, fostering an intensive exchange about requirements and promoting knowledge transfer in both directions. By applying user stories, requirements can be designed more flexibly and adapted, for example, to current market conditions.

Inhomogeneous Target Groups Argue Against Personas

The process differs when working with personas. A persona is understood as a typical user profile, which results from interviews with real users or by mapping statistical accumulations. Typically, several personas are developed to represent a typical target group. This process does not assume what goals the user has, but primarily aims to ensure that the basic requirements of the main user group are met.

The system of persona-based design originally comes from marketing or market research, where surveys are used to define a target group. With this system, less attention is paid to user-friendliness and more to the respective target group, which in my opinion can work for some web projects but is long outdated and obsolete. Primarily, a website should be user-friendly and clearly structured; everyone who uses it should feel comfortable, regardless of whether they belong to a defined target group or not. Every customer counts.

We have adjusted our workflow to working with user stories and leverage the benefits in all projects. It can happen that three or four people sit together for one or two days and play through all possible scenarios in front of a whiteboard. But the advantages of this system have convinced us, and there are no longer any unprepared surprises after the conceptualisation phase.