You'll learn: How to visualize user needs instead of product features How to make better decisions when prioritizing a UX backlog How to align sprints with UX strategy

1. User Story Mapping for Minimum
Lovable Products
Kelley Howell
UX Architect
June 15, 2017

2. Kelley Howell
UI engineering, UX, research,
kelleychowell
kelley_walker
uxkell@gmail

3. My goal
Share with you a technique for creating and organizing a
backlog that focuses on the needs and goals of your
users.

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Minimum Lovable Products

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Jeff Patton’s User Story Mapping
http://jpattonassociates.com/
http://jpattonassociates.com/

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What’s on tap today
1. What’s so great about user story mapping?
2. Understand the user story
3. Write good user stories
4. Understand the relationship between goals, activities,
tasks, and tools
5. The user story mapping process

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Why user story mapping?
1. Part of a user-centered design process
2. Visual way to show how people use your product and
what they value most about it
3. Visual representation of your product to help with
- Analyzing requirements
- Planning out iterative releases
- Organizing the development process

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The foundation

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The Agile Samurai by Jonathan Rasmusson
The Agile Samurai by Jonathan Rasmusson
From Jonathan Rasumussen, The Agile Samurai

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Purpose of a user story
 planning item
 token for a longer conversation
 method for deferring a longer conversation
 represents user needs and identifies user goals
 Focuses team on solving users’ problems

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User stories are also boundary objects
 build solidarity by bridging pro-
fessional and disciplinary
boundaries
 allow collaboration and
even without clear consensus

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1. Title - often a verb phrase
2. Description
As a [type of user]
I want to [perform some task]
so that I can [reach some goal]
3. Criteria for user acceptance
4. Add sketches & notes, specifications,
wireframes, mocks
A good user story

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Do user stories replace requirements?
Tom Hilton @ flickr.com/photos/tomhilton/

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Do not replace requirements
User stories are tokens for longer, deeper
conversations about what users need
Those conversations are memorialized with
artifacts
Artifacts include what we think of as “traditional”
requirements: spreadsheets, flow diagrams,
wireframes, mocks, scenarios use cases, pseudo
code, storyboards, and more

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This process helps us avoid this:
Credit: Andrew Stelleman and Jennifer Greene, Applied Software Project
Management, Learning Agile, and more

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But as well all know….
Credit: Axosoft Scrum Software
Not even team alignment or well-written user stories
are enough to tackle prioritization and release
planning, especially on large, complicated products

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How do we get from this --

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to a relatively orderly visualization?

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How do we prioritize?

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With user story mapping
20
Sketch concept inspired by Jeff Patton

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A method for analyzing and prioritizing a backlog that
reflects the order in which people complete activities
and in terms of the value those tasks bring to the users.
What is user story mapping?

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 center users’ perspectives in our discussions
 prioritize in terms of user goals
 shows relationships between different users and
their work flows
 confirm completeness of a product backlog
 work as a team
Benefits of user story mapping

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Exercise

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1. Brainstorm: as individuals write down all the steps
you take to accomplish your goal, organize in a
timeline
2. Reconvene: reconvene as a group and merge your
timelines
3. Identify Patterns: look for similarities and affinities,
grouping them together in clusters. Apply labels to
the clusters of similar tasks. Remove duplicates.
Instructions for workshop activity

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4. Order by time: The major clusters are activities. The
team should order them left to right in order people
will do them
5. Decompose tasks: Under each activity, list from top
to bottom the tasks people perform under each
activity. Order them according to how important or
valuable they are to the process.
Example Activity: Showering. Can that activity be done
without shampooing hair? Without conditioning?
Without loofah salt scrub routine? Shaving legs? Etc.
Instructions for workshop activity

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6. Break out paths: When you notice major difference
in types of users and their tasks, physically separate
those tasks as different paths
Question: Which paths are more important? How
do we know?
Instructions for workshop activity

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Getting to work – 2 paths

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What is a user story?Thinking at the task level

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I want soup for lunch

30. 1. Goal: what I want to
achieve or how I want to
feel
2. Activities and tasks: What I
do to achieve the goal
3. Tools: what I use to
perform tasks
30
Goals - Activities - Tasks - Tools
Goals
Activities
Tools
(apps, sites, software)
Tasks

31. Thinking at the task level
31
Illustration credit: Jeff Patton
From: Alistair Cockburn: Writing Effective Use Cases
Task /Functional - “Sea level”
Can complete at one sitting
Sub-Functional - “Fish level”
Tasks that, alone, don’t achieve a meaningful goal
Activity -- “Kite level”
Longer term goals often with no precise ending.
Too abstract
Too detailed
Focus user-centered
thinking here

32. Task: “Read an email message”
Activity: “Manage email”
Goal: Get information about my
job, my team, and company in
order to earn my salary
Task: “Pull monthly analytics
data”
Activity: “Write monthly report”
Goal: Convince management
team to take some action
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Goals
Activities
Tools
(apps, sites, software)
Tasks
Goals - Activities - Tasks - Tools

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Team refines and tests for completeness
Gary Levitt, owner & designer of Mad Mimi
The user story mapping process

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Know your users (lean UX personas)

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Sally – changing things up
Sally has been an agent for about
10 years. She’s used to doing
things the old-fashioned way:
holding open houses, advertising,
working her network. But now she wants to
branch out and learn how to use the Web. She’s
been using email and online applications for
awhile. But she’s been lackadaisical about it.
She wants to change up her routine, and make
sure her business doesn’t stagnate because
she’s not keeping up….

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Trevor – eager entrepreneur
Trevor is a new agent. He just got
his license and he’s really eager
and enthusiastic. Trevor is 37 and
just turned to real estate after a
couple different careers. Trevor is really
ambitious and has aspirations to run his own
brokerage one day. He knows that putting in a
big effort now will mean the difference between
success and failure. Trevor is constantly looking
for more information about how to run his
business….

37. Storyboards: can be used for the major activities to
capture major moments in the narrative.
Scenarios: tell more details stories about the various
tasks users do.
Plot points: include these to reflect decision points
were a user might take a different path
 Consider Sally: She often got too busy to go back to use the
product, to see what it could do.
37
Narrative Flow: stories about users

38. … Sally remembers she had seen an email offer for a
free trial. She doesn’t think she can find the email,
instead she looks for the trial offer at Homes.com.
She sees an advertisement for it, clicks it, and signs
up using the form. Then she takes a break to make
lunch. When she returns, she sees that she’s received
email confirming the sign up. In the email, she clicks
the link that will take her to her account. Then, she
is taken to the sign in page. However, she’s forgotten
which password she used, so she uses the “forgot
password” reminder to get a new password. When
she’s logged into her account, she sees that she can
import all her existing listings …
38
Meet Sally

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 Now that you’ve fleshed out the major narrative
flow, arrange the major activities by working from
left to right
 Tell the story from the user perspective, working in
the order that your user would perform the
activities
time
Order activities: narrative flow
Major
Activities
Discover
product
Onboard Manage
Listings

40.  Break down activities into tasks that comprise the
activity
 Don’t get hung up on order or being perfect: goal is
to get it out there
 Tweak later
40
time
Decompose activities into tasks
Discover Onboard Manage
Listings
Via email
advert
Signupfor
account
Add new
listing

41.  Vertical axis represents necessity
 Arrange tasks according to how important they are
to the activity the user is doing
41
Add in necessity
time
necessity
Discover Onboard Manage
Listing
Email
advert
Analyze
Listings
Edit
Listing
Search
Listings
Sort
Listings
Signupfor
account
Add new
listing
Search
engine
Search
marketing
CTA on
site

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Below each activity are
the child stories that
comprise the activity
Task flow and task decomposition
time
necessity

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1. Thens / and thens: signal horizontal movement
2. Or: signals vertical movement
3. Vertical overlap: when tasks happening around same
time
ands, thens, ors, and mores
time
necessity

44.  Record details so they’re not lost
 Tuck under existing task cards
44
time
Sub-Functional or “Fish level”
Tasks that, alone, don’t achieve a meaningful goal
What if you hit “fish level”?
necessity

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 Look for alternatives
What else might users do that didn’t come up in your
scenarios?
 Look for exceptions
What could go wrong, and what would the user have to do to
recover? How would our product prevent the problem in the
first place. How would we help them recover.
 Consider other users
What might other types of users do to reach their goals?
Might be: people, robots, search engines, other systems
Use workshops to fill in the gaps

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Verify with your users

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Slice out releases

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The user story mapping process
1. Write stories about how people use the product
2. Identify the activities that form backbone of your story
map and organize in the order they are performed
3. Flesh out the tasks people do to accomplish those
activities, ordering them by how necessary they are to
the activity
4. Be sure to explore alternative users, tasks, activity
flows and add in their paths and narratives
5. Slice out tasks according to how they help users
achieve specific outcomes

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Jeff Patton’s User Story Mapping
http://jpattonassociates.com/
http://jpattonassociates.com/

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the end!
Thoughts? Questions?
Thank you!
uxkell@gmail.com kelleychowell @kelley_walker