Keeping a Tight Rein on Complexity

As we identify more personas, scenarios, actors, and use cases, the product inevitably becomes more complex. It’s easy to lose track of our original “clear and simple” product design. We can manage this design entropy, to an extent, by grouping and rearranging the various artifacts, and by expanding individual scenarios into additional use cases where necessary.

But how do we know when to split up personas or roll scenarios into new use cases? From an interaction design standpoint, the process is all about discovering how different the UI needs to be for each target user.

In fact, having identified our first-pass set of personas, there are four possible approaches that we can take depending on how different the personas are. The approaches are as follows (listed here in order, from most similar to most disparate. Not by coincidence, this list is also in order of complexity, from simplest to most complex):

  1. Create just a single unified persona—an instance of one or more actors.

  2. Create separate personas but define them as instances of the same actor (e.g., we can call the roles “bob : Customer” and “carol : Customer”).

  3. Create a separate actor for each persona. We’d do this if the personas were different enough to warrant writing separate use cases, not just additional scenarios.

  4. Create separate UIs for each persona (essentially, different products).

Approach 1 is the Holy Grail to aspire to. Our goal is always to make the product as focused and simple as possible, and the best way to do this is to design the product around a single target user (i.e., a persona). Of course, this isn’t always going to be possible. As the product becomes more complex, we identify more target users. This complexity is managed by moving gradually (or is that grudgingly?) to the next approach in the list, and the next, and so on. As we do this, we end up with a more complex application. By actively controlling these steps as we design the product UI, we always keep the product as focused as possible and just complex enough for what its target users are trying to achieve.



Agile Development with ICONIX Process. People, Process, and Pragmatism
Agile Development with ICONIX Process: People, Process, and Pragmatism
ISBN: 1590594649
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2005
Pages: 97

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