Overview

At a development agency like AirDev, we scope and price client apps every day. But as the business scales, how can we ensure that our estimates and descriptions remain consistent from person to person? UserStory.co allows us, and other developers, to create specs and estimates that are consistent and fair based on our methodology.

The Original problem

When we set out to productize our scoping method, we had two user groups in mind: development agencies and entrepreneurs. Agencies scope and price apps all the time, but there isn’t a standard tool or process out there. Entrepreneurs have awesome app ideas but might not know how to fully communicate them to their stakeholders. Two different groups with two different problems.

PERSONAS

To illustrate the two potential user groups - agencies and entrepreneurs - I created some user personas to better understand their needs and motives.

wireframeS

At first, we chose to focus on the entrepreneur user type to test the theory that UserStory.co could be a tool to start the entrepreneurial journey. I created mock-ups, which I used to test with a set of users.

PROTOTYPE

I made several changes to the app’s UX based on these user testing sessions and developed a high-fidelity, fully-functional prototype using Bubble. And then… more testing.

Learnings

After many hours of user testing, two main learnings were coming to light:

1. Users who don’t have a solid, logical grasp on their app’s structure aren’t making quality scopes

2. Most entrepreneurs don’t have a solid, logical grasp on their app’s structure

It turns out that our most enthusiastic and successful users are software developers and product managers!

Pivot

Given these findings, we decided to shift our target user group towards the software development agencies and freelancers - people who are well-versed in the user story language and have the need to use the tool on a regular basis. I’m currently working on adjusting the tool’s features to better suit our new user group. There will be more focus on the scope and pricing and less focus on inspiring entrepreneurs to take the next step. Here are some recent shots of the app.