Scrum Update: Woof Woof Purr

Laurel Sch
UXDI 11 ATX
Published in
2 min readMar 19, 2018

Week 2 of scrum has started for our Pet matchmaking website. After the chaos that marked the beginning of our scrum process, we created a user backlog and began to divide tasks for tackling our project. I wanted to work on the research and process documentation for our project, which included taking our raw ideas and concepts and evolving them into thoughtful insights for our project. I am responsible for the project backlog, ensuring we implement the highest priority functions, and developing documentation of our process to support our prototype design.

For our user research component, I created an affinity map using insights from our multiple user interviews to identify key traits of our users. As an example, in every interview at some point a pet owner said that they “just knew” when they found their perfect pet. Because we’re tackling pet matchmaking, it became abundantly clear how important the emotional connection between person and pet would be for our project. Identifying this attribute and other important ones, namely the information gap between potential pet adopters and shelters, allowed me to create a persona we could move forward with, but also identify key objectives for our website.

In addition to the affinity maps and personas, I am currently working on a representation of our customer journey map, which follows a powerful story arc that is crucial for understanding the role our website would play as part of the pet adoption process.

One of the last pieces of my role is continued contact with the pet shelter we visited as part of our research, and hopefully this will lead to a demonstration of our prototype!

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