The patterns of user experience for sticky-note diagrams in software requirements workshops

Software requirements elicitation workshops often make use of a widely used and, on the surface, highly informal, notational medium: the sticky note. Often, in such workshops, facilitators and participants collaborate to construct “diagrams” made up of sticky notes. Methodologies have been developed that prescribe the way that diagram construction can uncover and document software requirements. Because they constitute a collaborative diagrammatic notation, such sticky-note diagrams lend themselves to an evaluation underpinned by theories of visual notation. In this paper we apply an analytic framework, the Patterns of User Experience (PUX), to sticky-note diagrams from two workshop methodologies, “Big Picture Event Storming” (BPES) by Alberto Brandolini and “User Story Mapping” (USM) by Jeff Patton. Our evaluation considers the sticky-note diagrams and the collaborative social processes surrounding them.