Personas in Software Development
Hello lovely readers of our medium. It’s Danin again, and this time I’d like to explain a little about Personas.
Person-what?
A “Persona” in agile development is used to define a type of user for the system. An example of sorts, for the types of people that will be using our product. The term “Persona” was coined by Alan Cooper, with the idea that for a software to be effective, then it needs to be designed for a specific person.
Person-why?
A good persona is highly specialized. Good personas can be used to visualize the product’s functionality and design needs. Here are several uses of a good persona:
- Used to validate product design. Is it accurate to what the users need? Is there something we can fix?
- As design inspiration for both front-end and back-end developers. Can we make our product work for these specific customers?
- Checkpoints for working software. Have we done what this customer needs? Did we miss anything?
- Allows stakeholders to visualize the needs of the customers. The stakeholders want this, but is it really the right way to go?
Person-our implementation
One interesting thing about our project, as I have once explained in the first article of PDB-R, is that we have three personas. The Secretariat (Sekre), the Student (Mahasiswa), and the Lecturer (Dosen).
The Secretariat is the role with the most things to do in our system. Adding student data, along with the thesis examination period and supervisor. What the Secretariat wants is that no data is missed, and all processes work fine. We can also see some frustrations the Secretariat has to deal with, which is if something goes wrong in the system.
The Student, obviously, is the creator of the thesis, and the one that has to undergo the process of thesis examination. If the system can allow the flow of the thesis examination to go smoothly, then the stress of the Student can be greatly reduced. Therefore this particular persona is useful for determining how we want the flow to work.
Last but not least, we have The Supervisor. The Supervisor is the role given to University Lecturers that supervise the Students in their thesis. All the supervisor really needs is a system to easily approve the thesis. The key motivation here is accessibility towards the examination schedule. The schedules set for examination should not intervene with the lecturer’s personal schedule. Thus we need a system that can integrate the schedules between examinations.
In our latest iteration of work, we have implemented the login for each of the personas above, and restricted access to pages that only certain personas can access.
That’s it from me, I hope you learned something from this article. Until next time.
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