User story mapping 101: What it is, who does it, and when it happens

What is User Story Mapping?

User story mapping is an agile product design method. Designing with user story mapping is?one of the most powerful ways to create a user-centered product.?The product design process always begins with understanding the problem and the user's goals. Collect each steps that the user takes to achieve her/his goals. Follow the natural, narrative flow of the user journey to explore all user activity easily. If an activity can be completed in various way, then you have different user stories.

By organizing user goals, activities, and user stories, you can?an intuitive, visual backlog, that everyone understands.?This is what we call user story map. Why is it so important to create such easy-to-understand documentation? Your customers need a simple way to confirm product goals. Plus, your teammates benefit from such a straightforward platform, with a clear description guide at the tip of their fingertips to which thay can add valuable ideas. To sum up, user story maps are the?aid to building shared understanding?between project members.

visual look at all the parts of a user story map

This will make a lot more sense as we go through the process of creating it. But I find it helps to have a visual anchor beforehand.

There are a number of benefits to approaching your backlog in this way:

• Puts the user first:?It’s difficult to choose a bundle of features that is both high value and immediately valuable. User maps look at a product from the user’s perspective, forcing you to put aside “nice-to-have” features and focus on what provides the most value to them now.
• Helps prioritize the?right?work:?Seeing every feature and story?in the context?of the larger product roadmap and company vision helps you know what needs to be done now. It also helps you to expose risks and dependencies and fill gaps.
• Breaks down epics into manageable stories:?If you’re having trouble writing user stories, mapping out your user’s journey can help you see how everything works together. This is especially helpful when it comes to breaking down larger stories or epics.
• Delivers new value early and often:?When you prioritize iterations by immediate value to the user, you’ll keep people happy, solicit better user feedback, and quickly learn what people want.
• Builds team consensus:?User story mapping is a team exercise, and as such, gives everyone a shared view and input into how the user journey works and why specific features matter more than others.

Who’s involved in user story mapping?

Because you’re dealing with the entire product, from the user’s experience to the company’s need to the technical requirements, it’s good to have a diverse group of people in the room with you. Typically, you’ll want 4-8 people from a few different groups:

1. Domain experts, testers, and UX designers:?People familiar with users and functionality
2. Stakeholders :?People with an idea of how the software will earn your company money
3. Developers:?People who know how long this will take to build

When should you map user stories?

Creating a user story map is a lengthy process, but it’s the backbone of your feature release. Think of it as a major planning session that kicks off major projects, pivots, or iterations. It’s a level higher than your usual sprint planning.

However, it’s so versatile that it can be used in many different phases of a project. You can map user stories during the initial product vision workshop or apply it to a small feature to provide context. You can even use it to restructure your seemingly endless backlog that’s gotten a little mixed up and lost focus after the last few releases.

In short, user story mapping can be used whenever you need to make sense of your product’s future while keeping its present state front and center.

User story mapping can be used whenever you need to make sense of your product’s future while keeping its present state front and center.

How to create a user story map in 7 steps

Creating a user story map takes time. But luckily you can follow a pretty clear and logical process while doing it. The key here is to use it as an opportunity to have discussions with team members you probably don’t interact with too often. If all goes well, everyone will come out of this session with a deeper understanding of your product’s vision and how it helps your user’s needs.

Step 1: Frame the journey

Before you start mapping, you want to frame the exercise around a common goal. This could be your product vision or the goal of a specific feature you’re mapping out.

One of the simplest ways to do this is just to ask:?What does our product do?

If this feels too big or gets too unwieldy, think about some constraints you can add to your user story mapping session:

• What??What problem are you trying to solve? What product do you want to build or what feature do you want to add?
• Who??Is there a specific user or user subset you’re building for? What benefits will each of them get from what you’re creating?
• Why??What’s the benefit to your company for building this feature or product? How will giving users this add value to the bottom line?

Talk it through and make sure everyone understands the?vision?and?overarching goal ?of the user story mapping session.

Step 2: Build your story backbone

Alright, with a vision and some constraints (or not!) it’s time to define your “backbone.” This is the entire user journey described in high-level tasks or steps from start to finish. Don’t get too detailed. At this point, you want to go wide, not deep.

As an example, let’s say we’re building a product that helps someone book a vacation home. At the highest level, the steps they take are:

1. Sign up for an account
2. Search for vacation homes by city/price/location/availability
3. View the home profile page
4. Enter payment information
5. Book home
6. Write a review for the homeowner

Your product is probably more complicated than that. And so there are a few good ways to help define your backbone.

• Ask an expert to tell a story:?Ask one of the subject matter experts to walk through the problem step-by-step. How do they tackle this? What steps do they take and what tasks do they perform? Have the rest of the team write these down on sticky notes and place them on the wall in logical order.
• Everyone writes:?Alternatively, if you have multiple SMEs or the team is very familiar with the user journey, everyone can write down the steps that need to be taken and put them up on the board, getting rid of or combining any duplicates.

At the end of this, you’ll have a bunch of steps posted left to right, taking your customer from the start to end of their journey. Take a second to step back and think about?narrative flow. Your user map tells a story. But some users might do things differently or in a different order. That’s fine. A story map isn’t a step-by-step guide, but a guide for conversation and planning. Think about?the ideal user flow, but know and discuss all the different use cases as they come up.

What if you’re working with an existing backlog??If you have a backlog full of well-written user stories (See notes above!) you can simply print them off and pull them into your map. In some cases, this might even be the majority of your steps.

Step 3: Identify and group activities

As you look through the steps your user takes, you’ll start to notice some common themes. Many of these steps are probably working towards a common goal. In user story mapping, we call these?activities.

So, in our vacation home example, you might group together steps like “Click sign up”, “enter personal information”, “get confirmation email”, and “open profile”. All these steps are part of the?activity?of “Account sign up.”

Your?activities?are listed above the?user steps?to make up your backbone.

You might also realize that some of your steps aren’t actually steps. You want to think about your map both?horizontally?and?vertically. This is a visual tool and where you place actions determines the overall flow.

• If you have groups of tasks that could be done at different times (for example, at this point, I could do X, Y, or Z), you would organize those?vertically?in a column as?a set of tasks or options.
• If you have a group of tasks that are done together (for example, I’d do A then B then C), those are?user steps?that are most likely going to be placed?horizontally.

Step 4: Break large tasks into subtasks

It’s time to go a step deeper. The steps in your backbone are most likely too big to be tackled in one sprint. So it’s time to?break those down into smaller tasks ?and user stories.

At this point, you’ll add cards, split them into two, rewrite and reorganize them. Tasks are placed underneath their associated step and activity to make it clear what goal each one supports.

Here are a couple suggestions of how to keep your group moving forward from the father of user story mapping, Jeff Patton:

• Play “wouldn’t it be cool if…”:?Use “blue sky thinking” and go crazy. Don’t let anyone shoot down ideas, no matter how big they are.
• Look for variations:?What else could your users do at this point? Are there recurring tasks that you need to include? Don’t get stuck in a single lane.
• Look for exceptions:?What could go wrong and what would a user logically do to try and recover? Look for as many potential issues as possible.
• Consider other users:?What would a different user do at this point? Being user-centric means thinking about?all?your users.
• Add in other product details:?Think about UI elements, data elements, business requirements.

Don’t worry about getting too crazy or writing down ideas that are out of scope. You’ll go through the process of taking them out of scope later on.

Step 5: Fill in the blanks

Before you move on, you want to look for any missing tasks on your map. One great way to test for gaps is to have someone walk through the scenario or from a different perspective (i.e. a different user persona). While they’re walking through it, have the rest of the team note any situations where you’re missing a step or where their behavior flow is different from what you have and put it up on the board.

It’s also good to get people from different parts of your company to go through this exercise. A UX designer might tell you where you’re missing steps in the customer journey, while a developer might tell you where a task is too big and needs to be broken down or too risky to implement.

This is also an opportunity to mark pain points or problems in your overall system. Someone walking through might say “this is an issue” where you hadn’t thought of it.

A user story map helps you see how things are?now?so you can create a better?future.

Step 6: Prioritize tasks and subtasks (but leave your backbone as is)

Your backbone tells the story of how your users move through your product. They’re all pretty much equally important as each step is necessary to move to the next one. The tasks that support them, however, aren’t.

Under each section, you can prioritize the importance of tasks by moving them up and done. Keep high-priority ones at the top and move ones that are less important lower down.

One suggestion is to split the map vertically into different sections, such as “Could”, “Should”, and “Must”. This way you can quickly see the tasks that are most important for supporting your core features.

Again, this is just a suggestion. How you organize your map will depend on your team and your product. Use the map as an opportunity to discuss flows and organization. The right answer is whatever works best for you.

Step 7: “Slice” groups of tasks into iterations

By now, you should have this massive beast of a user story. There’s your backbone on top full of user steps grouped by activities, and then a prioritized list of tasks “hanging” underneath. As you move through your map horizontally from left to right you get a full “slice” of what your product could do. Or, in other words, an iteration.

Now that you have the user map prioritized vertically, you can create horizontal “slices” that represent a holistic release. If you’ve prioritized properly, each slice should be a minimum viable product release, creating value across each user and activity.

This will probably look a little goofy with lines curving and bending to fit some features and not others, but that’s okay.

For each of these slices,?name the target outcome and impact.?What do you hope to accomplish with this release and how does it help contribute to?the overall goal that motivates your company ?

You should also?identify success metrics. For each slice, ask “what would we measure to determine that this is successful?” Ideally, your iterations will promote different user behaviors that you can track and test.

Example for user story mapping with steps by step guide

STEP 1 -?Discover project goals

The first step is to focus on your potential customers.?Summarize which goals the users achieve by using the product.?Write each goal on an index card or post it, and arrange them into the logical order.

For example on an accommodation website, the goals can be: “find hotels in Florida”, “choose the best hotel, near to the beach”, “book a room for a week”

STEP 2 -?Map the user journey

After collecting the goals, retell the user journey.?Identify the steps the user takes to fulfill her/his goal.?Avoid mistakes by dutifully follow the narrative flow. Place the post-its into the second line, step-by-step. If you discover missing steps, just put it into the journey.

Post-it notes are a smart solution to creating small documents, but the online story mapping tool delivers more flexibility.

STEP 3 -?Come up with solutions

The next step is to find solutions for achieving the user steps. Through this process, you create "user stories". Initially, you can use the following template:

As a user , I want so that step.

Using the accommodation example, user stories are: “As a user, I want to find hotels for my holiday, so I start browsing the discounts and advertisements” or “As a user, I want to find hotels for the next week, so I start searching by date.” Brainstorm with your team to collect the most possible solutions and put all user stories under the related steps.

STEP 4 -?Organize tasks based on priority

If tGTM-5GXSDZ2rming team was successful, the story map should be full of great ideas! User stories have different priority levels.?Identify the most common behavior or the basic solution to the problem.

Organize user stories by priority and place the most important card at the top of the column. Discussing priorities with the customer is crucial, so be sure to stay connected with your partners.

STEP 5 -?Slice out the release structure

First,?specify?the smallest working part of the product,?the Minimum Viable Product. It's always hard to choose the fewest tasks for a marketable product.

Try to complete the user journey by beginning with the most common or most easy-to-develop tasks. Just focus on completing at least one user journey. After that, try to organize the rest of the backlog into tangible pieces by drawing horizontal lines between cards.

If you add estimations to user stories, you can plan and schedule the whole development process release by release.?This is one of the most important pieces of information, so that your customer or executive needs to calculate delivery time and costs.

Top User Story Mapping Tools

1, JIRA

a standalone app you can use directly but if you are using Jira to track tasks and manage projects this app is extremely useful. Agile User Story Mapping for Jira is a Jira plugin available in?Atlassian marketplace , it adds following capabilities to Jira

A visual model of a Product Backlog from the users perspective

A tool for deliberate product discovery and learning

A way of creating a shared understanding

A method of exploring product capabilities and features

A prioritisation and release management tool

A way to build consensus between teams

A visual representation of progress and scope

Check it out here:?DevSamurai Agile User Story Mapping for Jira? (https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1222309/agile-user-story-mapping-board-for-jira )

2, FEATMAP

Featmap is built for product managers to build, plan and communicate product backlogs.

It is free and support basic story mapping features:

• Visualize backlog
• Drag&drop to map

Check it out:?Featmap

3, MIRO

Miro?is the online collaborative whiteboarding platform that enables distributed teams to work effectively together, from brainstorming with digital sticky notes to planning and managing agile workflows. User Story Mapping is one of the templates it supports so if you only need story mapping it may not be a good choice

Check it out:?https://miro.com/templates/user-story-map/

4, AVION

Avion is a new tool that makes building story maps really simple, and it integrates with Jira, GitHub, Trello, Azure DevOps, Slack, etc. It supports following features

– Build detailed user journeys

– Plan releases, spot dependencies

– Personas at the core of the product

– Export and share story maps

– workflows

Check it out :?https://www.avion.io

5,VISUAL PARADIGM

If you have a large collection of User Stories you should have a look Visual Paradigm User Story Map tool. It visualize four components of story map — User Activity, User Task, Epic, User Story. Support 3-level or 4-level map for complex backlog.

Check it out :?Visual Paradigm User Story Map tool