The University of Iowa

User Stories

Description

ActiveCollab tool used to track features and share user stories with web dev team.

ActiveCollab tool used to track features and share user stories with web dev team.

User stories form the basis for why products are developed and what a potential user is trying to accomplish. In this particular project, I used findings from earlier (internal and external) ethnographic studies and analytics review to determine main features requests for this website redesign project. 

By writing user stories for our website's target audience (faculty, TAs, staff), I was able to frame real-world scenarios in a way that were easily translated and shared with all members of the development team.

[Project feature] As a faculty, I am interested to learn about T & L projects to learn what my peers are doing, find new opportunities to get involved and investigate new teaching and learning strategies.

[People Page feature] As staff we want people to know who we are and that we are here to help, because is important to have direct relationships with faculty, built on trust and confidentiality.
— Sample User Stories

Tools

ActiveCollab is a cloud-based project management framework that we used for the redesign project. This served as a communication hub where we tracked all dev progress.

Impact

  • These served a valuable purpose of helping the product development team prioritize tasks and estimate the difficulty of completing them.