You have an idea for an app. But how do you explain what you want to a development team?

User Story Mapping is a tool to visualise an end-to-end flow of the user experience of a service off a product.

This is useful if you’re a startup or business wanting to build a piece of technology. It helps you communicate what you need in a way that allows both technical and non-technical people to come together and speak the same language.

8 simple Steps of User Story Mapping

how do you translate your vision of a digital product into a collection of user stories to populate a product backlog?

Creating a Story Map: Start with the Backbone

Step 1: Individually describe tasks needed to complete an activity.

Specify individual tasks on each Post-it note.

As a group, write these down individually in silence.

Think about the entire user journey from start to end and what actions the user is taking , what decisions their making and what they need to do for them to reach their goal.

Step 2: Combine common tasks and remove duplicates.

Come together as a group now and combine the common tasks. So there is unique tasks for each step in the user journey process.

Working in groups reduces the chance of missing things. Coming together to collaborate is like a giant bran of collective intelligence. The benefits of collective thinking.

Step 3: Order tasks from left to right in a narrative flow.

Order the tasks from left to right in a sequence from start to finish.

Step 4: Identify group and define activities.

Once you have your story line you can look at the relation of each step and group them into categories so you can see the fully functioning process at a high-level.

Step 5: Test for gaps and update flow if needed.

Review the process to see if there is any gaps. Is there anything missing from a business case or user perspective.

Creating a Story Map: Build Out Map with Prioritised Stories

Step 6: Map stories to expand out each user task.

Now that you have your high level user journey, you can start digging into what the user needed to do within each of those steps. Now, create user stories for each of these steps.

As a…. I want to…. So I can……

Each User story should meet. Criteria using the INVEST principle.

Independant: stand lone

Negotiable.

Valuable

Estimable

Small, enough to be developed in 1 iteration (20 day sprint)

Testable; can it be measured, is there an acceptance criteria.

Now, everyone generates as many user stories as the can, against the move INVEST. And places them under their most suitable task lists and activities.

There is no limit to the number of user stories.

Creating a Story Map: Build Out Map with Prioritised Stories

Step 7: Prioritise the stories under a task.

Now, you need to go through each user story and start to categories each one against a MOSCOW rule so you end up with a prioritised list of user stories.

Must have

Should have

Could have

Won’t have

The result of this will be a list of Must have user stories that will make up the backlog of the next development sprint.

Creating a Story Map: Create Outcome-based Release Slices