user story mapping for minimum lovable products

User Story Mapping for Minimum Lovable Products

Kelley HowellUX Architect June 15, 2017

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

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

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 story3. Write good user stories4. Understand the relationship between goals, activities, tasks, and tools5. 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 andeven without clear consensus

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1. Title - often a verb phrase

2. DescriptionAs 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 Stellema n a nd Jennifer Greene, Applied Software Proje ct Manageme nt, Le arning 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

20Sketch 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

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

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Goals - Activities - Tasks - Tools

Goals

Activities

Tools(apps, sites, software)

Tasks

Thinking at the task level

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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

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 about10 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….

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.

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Narrative Flow: stories about users

… 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 …

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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

Discoverproduct

Onboard ManageListings

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

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time

Decompose activities into tasks

Discover Onboard Manage Listings

Via email advert

Sign up for account

Add newlisting

Vertical axis represents necessity Arrange tasks according to how important they are

to the activity the user is doing

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Add in necessity

time

necessity

Discover Onboard Manage Listing

Emailadvert

AnalyzeListings

EditListing

SearchListings

SortListings

Sign up for account

Add newlisting

Searchengine

SearchmarketingCTA onsite

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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 movement3. Vertical overlap: when tasks happening around same

time

ands, thens, ors, and mores

time

necessity

Record details so they’re not lost Tuck under existing task cards

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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 alternativesWhat else might users do that didn’t come up in your scenarios?

Look for exceptionsWhat 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 usersWhat 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