On the contributions of non-technical stakeholders to describing UX requirements by applying proto-persona

Abstract

Context: Requirements elicitation is a software development phase that should investigate both functional and user experience (UX) requirements. Proto-persona is a technique that encourages the attention on the needs of a group of users. Usually, its elaboration is conducted by software specialists, technical stakeholders. However, non-technical stakeholders usually know more about target users and frequently do not take part in proto-persona elaboration. Objective: This work has the goal of investigating the contribution of non-technical stakeholders in the specification of UX requirements by using the proto-persona technique. For this, we explored the construction of the proto-personas and the use of these to the prototyping of solutions. Method: We carried out an empirical study in two rounds from which we analyzed and compared the contribution that technical and non-technical stakeholders had on the specification of UX requirements. In the first, 8 non-technical and 5 technical stakeholders built proto-personas. Afterwards, 18 pairs of software developers created low fidelity prototypes by using the information of proto-personas.~For the two rounds, we conducted a qualitative analysis exploring which UX requirements were described and used. Results: Our results revealed that both stakeholders have written up details of UX requirements on the artifact, however, throughout different and complementary perspectives. We also could observe that proto-personas produced by both were used on the prototyping activity. Conclusion: Our paper contributed to demonstrate that non-technical stakeholders were able to contribute to the specification of UX requirements and that proto-persona can boost such activity.