User Story Mapping: 7-Step Guide
Are you looking for an effective way to get deep insights into how your users will interact with your product? User story mapping will help you save resources by visualizing the clients’ journey and receiving a clear vision of what needs to be done.
Using a user story map as a core technique, you will outline a map based on customers’ interactions with your future or existing product. In the long term, it facilitates the development process, allowing your team to prioritize the needed features for your solutions.
Sounds promising, isn’t it? The challenging point is that creating such a map requires time and knowledge; our experts completed this guide to facilitate the creation of user stories. But before diving into the mapping process, let’s become familiar with the definition, benefits, and challenges you may encounter.
What is user story mapping?
Example of user story mapping.
The user story format is a visualized model that enables managers to prioritize tasks and build a process in such a way as to ensure the desired result. User story maps help improve shared understanding and prioritize the development process.
In a physical story map, IT engineering teams assemble a well-structured dynamic diagram of how an imaginary user and product interact. Next, developers define an organizational process and put it on sticky notes with specific steps that will bring the most benefit from the user’s perspective.
Arranging user stories is an excellent opportunity to discover top priorities before starting the development process. In the meantime, multiple agile organizations utilize user story mapping as the most effective alternative to backlog items or flat backlog lists, simplifying further development.
This method was founded on the concept of smaller user stories, which provides the grouping and analysis of user value requirements necessary to develop a high-quality product. As a rule, arranging user stories on the developer side is done in a format that lets a team capture the business value and complete scheduled tasks within a sprint.
Once you delve into story mapping, you can get blurred by exotic notions like backbone, epics, user tasks, or stories. Do not rush to panic because these steps and processes are core parts of this approach. Let’s go over a few of them right away:
- The backbone stands for describing the whole story and the essential capabilities that the system must have on board. Remember that your backbone should assemble a story map that maps the customer’s journey from the simplest to the high-level actions a user will go through while using your product.
- Epics means a complete story, overarching user tasks, or steps that contain a user story. They are not big enough to be a separate unit or a product development process task. However, the stories they put together on the same page probably are.
- User stories can be presented as a specific goal or outcome from a customer’s perspective. From the team’s point of view of implementing a future or existing effort, this term means the smallest unit in the agile development structure that describes how a piece of a stage will deliver real value to a client.
Now, story mapping anatomy looks much more understandable. Once your team highlights these elements in the development process, the whole picture of creating a product will look more explicit and intelligible.
If you want to hire product designers to implement your idea, you have to understand that the story map exercise and further design is a collaborative effort between multiple teams working on acceptance criteria and creating a valuable solution. The list of tech specialists may be a wasted effort; to avoid it, here is a list of in-demand members that includes but is not limited to:
- Product managers,
- Marketing,
- Engineering,
- Ops/IT,
- Product owners,
- Customer support,
- Legal,
- Business analysts,
- UX/design,
- Finance,
- Product Manager,
- Independent consultants,
- Sales.
Collaboration of team members for user story mapping.
Benefits of a user story map
The story map technique helps your development team capture the strategic picture and form a complete picture of a customer journey before delving into the development process and creating a minimum viable product. Below, you will find guidance from Limeup experts on user story mapping that you can employ within your teams and enhance the process of creating an ideal product from a user perspective:
Benefits of user story mapping.
- A clear focus on user values. If your team assembles a map creation with the user’s values in mind, you can first release a product focused on the user’s needs and values. The story map is a highly effective tool for comprehending how potential users perceive your product and what modifications will help achieve outstanding results.
- Cost-effective workflow. Creating a comprehensive work process visualization is a mandatory step required for CPE (Complete Product Experience) delivery so that teams can pick the highest priority tasks and schedule the workflow through releases. Thus, product development teams will de-prioritize missions filled with minimal value for a user.
- Transparent and scalable requirements. Some product teams move heaven and earth to create powerful user stories and conditions. At the same time, it’s ideal for creating an idea of how more oversized work items can be divided into minor tasks and how these same work items match each other.
- Early reviews and real user value. Once you get into the user story, you can group all the work into specific iterations, depending on how valuable it will be to users. By focusing on the things that matter most first, product teams can capture and leverage early feedback from customers. As a result, you will understand which features and aspects of the product are the most valuable.
- Recognizing the risks of addictions. An example shows how users interact with a product, allowing the team to operate this information to get a general idea of the product and further visualize risks and dependencies. This way, you can better prepare for a successful product release.
- Team consensus. The organization will give your engineers an overview of the customer journey and the steps needed to improve it. The mapping exercise provides an internal touch between team members, contributing to a better common understanding of when and what assignments should be done first.
- Improved results with user story mapping. You will undoubtedly get the best results by working with a potential user or expert who understands the functionality and operation of your application, as well as the concerns the product design process is aimed at.
The main thing to understand at this stage is that the story map is a model that allows development teams to quickly and efficiently respond to all sorts of changes. Every time you add, edit, or delete a user story, you can easily comprehend what other changes need to be assembled to the workflow to grow user value.
User story mapping vs. journey mapping vs. event storming
Some developers argue that story maps have several similarities with other models. The user story only remotely resembles event storming and customer journey mapping. Wonder why? Here are the Limeup experts’ arguments.
If you desire to visualize the path users need to take to achieve goals, use user story mapping as a UX tool. On the other hand, a journey map is necessary to get a big picture of how one client or person goes through a particular scenario with specific expectations. Journey mapping has real benefits for team alignment as it reveals a user experience, decisions made, and product vision.
Event storming is another high-level approach by an independent consultant, developers, and managers in the early planning stages. The collected notes allow you to outline the upcoming business processes and systematize business events, commands, and reactions by transferring all the information to the appropriate sticky notes.
User story mapping vs other research methods.
7 steps to create a user story map
As a rule, the first story visual mapping stage begins with determining which medium should be employed to organize the work of the story map. Here, you can choose from the following resources:
- Sticky notes,
- Whiteboard,
- Roadmaps,
- A wall.
It doesn’t matter which of the mediums you choose at this stage. The most important thing is to follow these seven steps to create a user story map properly.
Step 1: Statement of the problem
Determine precisely what problems your product solves for customers or what goals it aids them to achieve. Once you understand these things, you can picture the steps needed to complete the related plan and what tasks are critical when you organize work.
Transfer all the received data to organize all the information correctly. This approach has also proven to work well for upcoming releases and enhancements to existing applications. This is how a statement of the problem formula should look like:
Statement of the problem formula for user story mapping.
Step 2. Buyer personas analysis
Do you already know who the target audience of your product is? You will likely end up with not one but many user portraits, and for a good reason. The fact is that different audiences have multiple types of goals and ways of interacting with new features and the product as a whole.
Defining target audience.
Therefore, buyer personas assessment is an important exercise where teams define and organize target audiences and then build user story mapping accordingly.
Creating a user persona will help see the target users' collective image.
Step 3. Users’ map activities
By completing the target audience check, you can understand how all users interacting with a product will act in different environments. In this way, you can define a set of joint actions and shared experiences combined through the so-called functions and themes. These elements are the key things that form the backbone of a user story mapping example.
For example, you are building an e-commerce application. Next, end product users may want to go by multiple paths:
Example of users' map activities.
- Go to the main menu and analyze the categories
- Add the chosen items to the cart
- Create a list of favorite products
- Take action and make a purchase
- Decide to explore the terms of delivery or return of goods
Each of these actions should be moved to the top-level user story mapping. Subsequently, the team should break this data iceberg into smaller pieces and form short stories.
Step 4: Mapping user story under activities
Once you’ve formed the backbone and defined the core themes, it makes sense for the product team to organize the map’s structure by breaking each big picture into smaller user stories. For example, users viewing products in a particular category may want to save a specific product to their account to purchase it later.
Step 5: User story maps prioritization
With the high-level themes and more detailed stories in place, the team begins to prioritize stories and rank them vertically, placing more critical tasks at the top. Next, the command defines the user’s path through the product. If the target audience of users includes multiple types, the agile team must map different scenarios for each group.
This exercise lets you identify the highest-priority stories and create a product that meets the target audience’s expectations. On the other hand, a London UX design agency may also describe maps, focusing on interface elements or their values.
Example of prioritization of user stories.
Step 6. Technical requirements, dependencies, and alternatives
User story mapping is an effective tool for teams to identify potential issues, missing information, and bottlenecks that can impact workflow speed. Recognizing these risks before design starts eliminates the threat of missed deadlines and helps find alternative solutions ahead of time.
Requirements collection.
Step 7. Schedule releases and sprints
Finally, we reached the stage where the teams materialized story mapping into concrete outcomes. By organizing stories in a top-down, prioritized way, teams can easily define user flow and steps to acquire maximum results quickly.
Next, all stories are broken down into sprints and product releases. Please note that this step does not define the steps required to develop a minimum viable product. By planning sprints and releases, IT engineers get a complete picture of future tasks prioritized in advance.
Example of scheduling.
Story mapping is completed: What's next?
Completing the story mapping exercise will mark the beginning of planning the highest-priority tasks for the upcoming sprints and releases. It will be helpful to share the result with other agile teams or members of senior management who did not take part in the formation of story maps to gain support and agreement with the roadmap on their side.
The contribution to map development must be made not only by the teams participating in the process. All units in the product organization will also need to do their bit.
Next, you must move the user story mapping artifacts into a shared location. In the meantime, IT engineers can shed light on technical specifications and refine acceptance criteria. Such a step is necessary to ensure that the product will have the maximum value for the user, considering the story maps defined earlier.
Remember that there is no point in making a story map a static document. It would be best to supplement it with user activity feedback, new research results, or revised calculations that may come after sprints and releases. A user story map is also used as a roadmap to keep track of completed and scheduled tasks from sprint to sprint.
This exercise is an excellent opportunity for teams to get closer to the buyer’s appetites and feel the client’s journey using the application. Today, it’s one of the most effective tools for enabling product organizations to understand and reproduce customer journey value with a step-by-step approach designed to improve the application as each stage of development progresses.
Tips & challenges for successful user story maps
Experienced agile teams often use in-house tricks to avoid problems and increase the approach efficiency. Below, you will learn about a few guidelines that Limeup – the trusted and dedicated product design company in the UK, uses from project to project. Let’s start with the tips.
Limeup hints for better user story mapping.
- Involve people who can make a real difference. Sometimes, it is a real challenge to assemble a team of specialists who can offer their views on a user story map. Top management can be busy solving strategic concerns without being able to attend brainstorms. Your task is to convince all group members to find time for analysis, even if it will be done in video conferencing format.
- Do not rush to organize and go through a user story process in one day. Complex products will undoubtedly require considerable time and resources. Break the story mapping session into several days with two- or three-hour pieces. This way, you have a better chance of getting the right people in one place and coordinating team activities based on individual calendars.
- Leave all the reins of governance to one facilitator. If you want the process to be organized correctly and all group members to be present during story mapping, delegate this function to a specific person. Product organizations sometimes favor managers from other teams with a cool head and an open mind.
- Minimize distractions. Ensure team members do not use personal devices for mapping. Ideally, the facilitator should be the only person using the device to capture information and ideas. Ask employees to leave laptops and smartphones outside the doors. So you can fully immerse the team in the discussion process and get the desired result.
The last thing to pay attention to is the focus on data and evidence. User stories should include specific data and supporting evidence for the path the user is expected to take using your application.
Now, let’s overview what challenges your team may face with processes:
- Lack of information about the target audience. If you do not pay due attention to buyer persona research, you cannot correctly determine how users will perceive your product. Define the application’s target audience before proceeding with user story mapping.
- Irrelevant users need understanding. A vague perception of your users’ pain points is a road to nowhere, as your product will be too far from reality, leading to negative consequences. False user goals lead to a waste of financial and time resources in story mapping and sprints.
- Lost focus on the whole picture. Providing a map of users’ activities and vision may lead to prioritizing minor feature improvements but still doesn’t show a clear view of the future product. Your team needs to pay attention and remember that the result must be a full-fledged solution.
It will be better if a team uses an online board with shared access to other groups, which may be located in entirely different places.
The named tips and tricks for user story maps can also be modified for an existing product. You can easily use the approach to improve applications, recreate the big picture of processes, or fix vulnerabilities.
This approach allows you to identify new promising features and implement them in the context of existing applications. Even if you can’t develop a story mapping for an existing application (regardless of the reason), it allows you to identify and locate all existing user activities. In this way, you can look at the context of the application and understand what new features can improve the product and provide additional value to a client.
For example, consider implementing a new feature to send emails to the target audience. You must add the option to select multiple contacts to the existing list and consider implementing additional filtering options.
Calculating value after user story mapping.
Final words about the story map
Story mapping helps in product discovery, including the description of a new product or the designation of features for existing applications. As a result, teams receive data storage, where all user activities are divided into specific functional groups. This tool allows product organizations to capture the big picture and the details that can improve the final product.
Most technical experts agree that the primary purpose of user story mapping is to discover and prioritize specific steps before development. It ensures that all actions and tasks are placed on the so-called map, describing how each story fits into the context. This way, an agile team can quickly identify gaps and potential issues and decide which to prioritize.
For now, you know what user mapping stands for, how to create a story map, its advantages for your business, tips, and even challenges to be aware of. Further, you will be able to create maps for numerous products, ensuring a customer-centric approach and establishing users’ needs as a core value.