Don’t Let Discrete User Stories Hurt Overall Usability
I just logged into the Marriott rewards program web site to purchase some additional Marriott rewards points for my account. Unfortunately, I have to take a quick break from this task to write this blog.
Now, stay with me and help me understand if this makes sense to you.
- I sign into the site using my Marriott rewards number and password.
- I click through a few menus to get to the page to purchase points.
- The page to purchase points asks me for… my Marriott rewards number.
Huh? Didn’t I just enter it?
Makes you realize just how important it is to consider the full task flow of a user story in an Agile context.
Let’s take a leap of faith and imagine that the Marriott development team is using Agile. That’s not such a big leap, given the recent trends around Agile. Consider that the product manager of the Marriott rewards program could have written an entirely reasonable user story that went something like this:
“As a Marriott rewards member, I can purchase more points from the web site.”
The dev team, looking at this story, could have designed their current web site, which, IMHO, fulfills the user story.
But is less usable than a web site designed to know who I am and therefore one that wouldn’t ask me for information the system obviously already has.
To get around this particular problem you have to think of your Information Architecture like every other kind of architecture – something that guides the overall structure of the web site. In this case, IA subsumes UX, and would enable the dev team to restructure user stories into the context of an overall workflow.
Back to work…
April 28th, 2008 at 28 Apr 2008
Doing agile does not mean you don’t have to think about what your doing!