Agile Bench

Before Shot

The first release of Agile Bench was built over the last 9 months (yes that’s a lot of weekends and nights). We  wanted to get a product into production as quickly as possible so we created an Information Architecture (IA) based around our domain model and then released this version to a group of close friends. Once we were in alpha, we started to use Agile Bench to manage our own project which was a real eye opener, it didn’t take long before we discovered some key issues that needed to be resolved, part if this was own to the IA, primary activities were elongated due to navigational and flow issues.

To take Agile Bench to the next level ready for a full release we decided to use a persona based approached to rework the IA.

We defined 3 key personas, a delivery manager, a developer (to cover tech, UX and testing) and a product manager. Firstly we gave the personas some background including previous experience, focus and responsibilities. Then we identified the tasks that each persona would undertake and prioritized them based on how important we thought they were to project success.

After Shot

Once we had identified the key activities we reworked the IA to make those activities as straight forward as possible putting the right information in an easy to understand structure.

As you can see from the before and after screen shots, the IA of the site changed quite dramatically.

The persona based approach worked really well and we plan to continue using these key personas to design and deliver future requirements.