Eliciting Requirements Using Personas and Empathy Map to Enhance the User Experience

More than just meet the functional requirements, software is expected to promote a good user experience to its users. However, to achieve an adequate degree of user experience, it is necessary to understand users, their needs and expectations very well. Currently, part of the software industry focuses on developing mobile Web applications. A significant difficulty in the design of this type of application is that the development team often does not have a clear group of target users available, with whom the team could use traditional techniques for eliciting requirements such as interviews and questionnaires. Therefore, it is necessary to use different techniques that allow an immersion in the needs and characteristics of users, even when the users are not directly involved in the development. One of these techniques that help thinking of the target users of the application is the Persona technique. An important criticism of the Personas technique is that it does not always help design the solution for real users´ needs. This perception of a low degree of usefulness limits the acceptance and adoption of the technique. To address these concerns, this paper presents the PATHY (Persona empathy) technique, which assists designers and developers in thinking about the target users´ goals and characteristics, as well as the application characteristics to help users achieve their goals. This paper also discusses the results of a preliminary study, presenting the analysis of personas generated using the PATHY technique and a new version of the technique improved from this analysis.