The Hungry Ant

I just finished building a flash website for a very talented Sardinian photographer friend of mine. Check it out at www.antoniosaba.com and let me know what you think.

We are currently developing a new product and are busy analysing all the data we have gathered from interviews and statistical data to create our personas.

My aim as a product owner (in my agile hat) is to arrive at a product backlog that has user stories that are fine grained enough that we can estimate how long things will take. The problem is that often it is difficult to get to the this breakdown as we lack information.

A natural fallout of creating personas is that you often have a set of large stories that describe how a user will use the product. This is agile speak is called an Epic and can then be broken down into smaller chunks for estimating.

Storyboarding is a powerful, tried and tested method of thinking about epics and I like to work with the interaction designers to visualise the Epics. This way we are also thinking about the interface and the interaction which is the next phase for the interaction designers anyway.

The storyboards are quick sketches that I will then breakdown into a set of user stories that can be estimated and hence be actually developed.

So an epic maybe something like:

“George wants to choose where to go on holiday as he has two weeks off at christmas”

which may breakdown to

“George wants to search for a beach holiday because he needs some sun and sand”

“George want to go from the 12th to the 30th of June because that is when his holidays are”

…

I will also add Epics to the product backlog but at a lower priority while they need to be expanded with detail.