User task matrix template

Project Task List Template for Excel. Simple Task Tracker Template for Excel. Action Items Template. Gantt Chart Template. To Do List Template. Homework To Do List. Multi-Step Task List.

Working with constraints opens up new possibilities. There are many techniques time saving, deep probing, activities driven, etc which will get you to the roots of user needs. I use combination of different techniques — conducting user experience review, analyzing the web traffic, creating the competitive benchmarking matrix, quick paper prototyping and creating a case to quantify business benefits. Whatever your technique is or combination of techniques used, you have to discover the following things:.

How many users are currently using the product? Understand the volumetric data — how many users will be impacted with design changes. What are the different types of users using the product?

The HR executive might be accessing the corporate portal to get CVs of prospective employees. Understand the width and depth of users. When do they use this product? How do they use the product?

Why do they use the product? Great insights can open up a new product design idea altogether. LinkedIn , which started off as business networking site is now being used by recruitment site by many companies. The previous point actually brings us to a very important question — What do the users really want to do?

What are their goals? Another goal could be easy troubleshooting of the bike. If you are designing a restaurant app for mobile, one of the user goals could get the table booked. For airline booking, the user goal could be booking a seat. If we break this goal into smaller steps i. Android phone users missed the screen capture functionality on the mobile, when the mobile OS was launched — they had to actually capture the screenshot by clicking a photo of the phone screen.

Designers will notice these kinds of issues when they meet the users, looking at the product usage and incorporate these changes in the new product release. Another example is of the flexible straw, which was invented by Joseph Friedman — he saw his daughter having a tough time with the straight straw while drinking. He created corrugations in the paper straw using a screw and made a prototype of it, patented it and made a career out of it.

Unlike US, you do not have to pay upfront on the website to buy. Users will abandon the product immediately. You need to be probed deeper. Some people will buy a certain brand that sets them apart from the mass. There are always mass products and class products. Some products always exude desirability — think of all Apple products. Marketing professionals rely on this aspect to position their product.

Guess what that product feature could be :? It was single-key operation. Yes, one key for all the users tasks — starting the scooter, unlocking the front and side compartments, removing the spare tire from the back, etc — all with just one key.

The Bajaj scooters had at least 3 keys to do all those operations. Time, context and needs of the users change over time. That line comes at in the movie. Men In Black trailer. Flipkart is the biggest e-commerce website in India. So what went wrong? Remember this logo? Google thought that users would ride the wave and make it their first choice tool for messaging.

It had a great start, but soon Google had to rework their strategy and discontinue the product. It was little bit of email, little bit of chat and little bit of everything else. The curiosity value it had, made the users adoption easy. Were the users not ready for this tool — was the product way ahead of its time?

Can this be a case of Google making assumptions about user behavior and extrapolating the test results? Perhaps, there were business reasons too to discontinue the service. It is a difficult proposition to enter into Indian food market for any American brand, that too in the breakfast category. India is a complex geography for business; anyone entering this market new or anew often takes cautious steps. Thirteen years after it started in and gaining great insights, it launched a rotary-gear 4-stroke motorcycle named Street.

It was truly a revolutionary technology for urban commuters, the ease of riding, low maintenance and the Hero Honda trust factor — all these points stacked up to make it a success.

I was one of the enthusiastic buyers :. I still drive one to this day. But the bike did not excite larger audience. Positioning of the product was not that great. The company discontinued the production in few years. Do they really know what they want? Project and product managers can use this template to sequence the order of activities a user experiences as they utilize a system.

The y-axis represents the increasing sophistication of the functionality being mapped; the x-axis contains the sequential order of activities that users experience as they utilize a system. The first row contains the most basic functionality, and subsequent rows become more complex. An epic is a chunk of work that addresses some functionality to be developed, and they can be used to generate user stories. Utilize this template to write epics. Then, trace the user stories that are generated from each epic.

Project and product managers can use this template to manage the work generated from the epics, and all other team members can use it to create epics. A user story is a short a sentence or two , simple, and specific description of an interaction with an in-development product, usually an app or website.

Of course, they can also be used for the development of other projects. User stories are used as a framework to guide developers, designers, product managers, and others involved in building a product.

User stories should define who the users are and what they will do with the product or service. However, a user story should not describe how to implement or develop a feature or function. User stories are an integral part of the Agile software development methodology. In comparison to traditional project management methods i. Waterfall , Agile is a flexible and iterative process. Agile runs in cycles, called iterations , that last from one to four weeks.

In each iteration, developers work to create new functionality or improve existing functionality. Userser stories are used to to guide how to create functionality. The free, downloadable templates below can be used for creating and working with user stories in various phases of the Agile process. You can read more about Agile and download free Agile project management templates here. Scrum is a variation on the widely-used Agile method. There are some differences between the practices of the two methods: Scrum refers to a daily, short team meeting to discuss progress and plans.

In Scrum, cycles are called sprints instead of iterations, and acceptance criteria are referred to as definition of done DOD.

However, Scrum and Agile do share high-level principles. There is not a specific format for Agile user stories, so a number of variations exist though they vary only slightly in terminology. User stories are often pulled out of epics , which often follow a format similar to that of user stories. However, epics are more high level and cover multiple functions. They can also be stated as short phrases. Epics are too broad to be completed in one Agile iteration, so they need to be broken down.

The idea is not to eliminate anything from the epic, but to create user stories that are granular enough to be completed in a single iteration. Example epics for a calendar app might include the following:. Initially, it can be difficult to distinguish between an epic and a user story, but it becomes easier with experience.

Epics and user stories should be based on the needs of users rather than on speculation — interviews with users or potential users ensure that the stories will be based on reality. Many organizations also use personas when creating user stories. A persona is a short biography of a fictitious user that helps designers and developers focus on a specific user type rather than a general, imaginary user.

Some organizations break down user stories into child stories also called sub-stories that fit the work needed into a single iteration. Anyone on a project can write user stories at any time during the project. Generally, a story-writing session happens before the first iteration, which gives the product team a backlog of stories to tackle. Read more about the process of writing users stories here. There are some helpful frameworks to help for writing strong user stories.

User stories have become popular in Agile and other methodologies because they provide value and help product development teams work toward the goal of creating functionality that meets user needs. Here are some of the benefits of user stories:. Here are some of the associated challenges:.