Second Team Meeting

Tuesday Team Meeting #2: Getting the hang of it

Ask yourself “Why?” to help guide you

I was truly looking forward to meeting with my team today. Its hard working away from everyone and trying to work together online, chatting in a Discord server. My teammates posted what they were working on, which was great! They went through the app store/play store to look up some ADHD/task management apps and get information like descriptions, number of downloads, reviews, and (my favorite) who made the app. Was it made by developers or were researchers involved?

But I feel like having a “Why?” would have helped. And an understanding.

My goal was to write user stories. I took software engineering; I’ve been reading about Agile methodology, of course we need user stories! It’s what you use to emphasize, figure out which features would help those hypothetical users, rather than just guessing what features your user needs. I knew what I needed. We thought about sources we could use to generate these user stories. In the past (undergrad) we just made them up. Because we didn’t understand why.

The goal shouldn’t have been “write user stores”. The goal should be “emphasize with our users, find out their needs, pain points, attributes, and write a story about your user”. This is WHY we need user stories. Not because I read about it in a book, but because it will help drive our project’s design and development.

Our professor helped guide our brainstorming with some helpful diagramming. I realized that we should only have a couple user stories. I was under the impression that I needed to systematically go through app reviews and Youtube comments to try and find who the users of this app could be, and make a huge list of their attributes.

MVP - Minimum Viable Product

This brings me back to the MVP. By only having a couple user stories, you are narrowing your scope, and thinking of quality vs quantity. It would be really unfortunate if we waste time making this app for so many different personas and they don’t even like it at all. The reason why we make user stories and personas is so that we have a focus and know exactly what we need, and make what’s necessary so we can start testing!

Answering the “Why?” helps figure out the “What?”

Now that I know why I need to make these user stories, I am more informed about what I need to do. My plan during the next few days is to go through the book “How to ADHD” by Jessica McCabe (I’ve been reading it and it’s really good!). The book has quote bubbles with people speaking about their ADHD experience, and it just dawned on me today that those could be an excellent source of user story inspiration!.

Additionally, I want to go through the app store/play store and read reviews on apps that advertise using AI, since that’s what I want to do. I will look at the reviews, see what users like and dislike, and start gathering some info. And not to get in the systematic review mindset! That was for the systematic review PAPER, that’s not needed for this.

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