Building a national e-service using Sentire experience report on the use of Sentire : a volere-based requirements framework driven by calibrated personas and simulated user feedback

Abstract

User experience (UX) is difficult to quantify and thus more challenging to require and guarantee. It is also difficult to gauge the potential impact on users’ lived experience, especially at the earlier stages of the development life cycle, particularly before hi fidelity prototypes are developed. We believe that the enrolment process is a major hurdle for e-government service adoption and badly designed processes might result in negative repercussions for both the policy maker and the different user groups involved; non-adoption and resentment are two risks that may result in low return on investment (ROI), lost political goodwill and ultimately a negative lived experience for citizens. Identity assurance requirements need to balance out the real value of the assets being secured (risk) with the user groups’ acceptance thresholds (based on a continuous cost-benefit exercise factoring in cognitive and physical workload). Sentire is a persona-centric requirements framework built on and extending the Volere requirements process with UX-analytics, reusable user behavioural models and simulated user feedback through calibrated personas. In this paper we present a story on how Sentire was adopted in the development of a national public-facing e-service. Daily journaling was used throughout the project and a custom built cloud-based CASE tool was used to manage the whole process. This paper outlines our experiences and lessons learnt.