Pat’s Point of View

Short stories are an excellent way of communicating user needs; not just use cases but needs, desires, joys and frustrations. While it was written as a creative short story, “To do” is a very realistic depiction of how someone might use personal organisation tools, and more importantly how they might feel about their experiences. Here’s a taste:

Every time I cross one item off the list, another seems to appear. Making a dental appointment should be a cause for celebration, a satisfying tick; instead, it leads to more appointments, white waiting rooms, condescending child-receptionists and x-rays. And while I now know exactly what I need to do, it’s getting harder to keep track of the when.

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This story has feeling, it is human. Compare this to the way in which user experience requirements that have been captured for one of your projects. I think there’s a huge benefit in presenting the needs of our audiences in this way. It goes beyond a mere scenario, in that it uses the power of creative writing to put you inside the head of the person using—or should that be surviving?—the things we design.

I know the author of this story probably wasn’t describing a real series of events, but the story would have been inspired by real situations, pieced together to create a whole story. This story represents his experiences using to-do lists and other productivity tools. You can easily do the same thing based on the findings of design research.

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