User stories help us to get a shape of the project (what), and its purpose (why)
By collaboratively developing a User Experience Strategy with clients, we can create a shared and holistic vision for the project that guides us through the design phases of the project. Central to a User Experience Strategy is the perspective of the people who will actually use the Website. Part of developing the strategy is re-framing the project from a user experience perspective.
The client perspective often starts as an abstracted, inside out view of the project via feature lists and technical specifications. A user perspective on the other hand looks at the project from the viewpoint of those who will use it. By re-framing the project in terms of the intended user experience we shift to this perspective. This perspective is necessarily more concrete because it forces us to take context into account. In order to effectively think through the project from the user’s point of view we must think though some of the variables of the situation in which it will be used. This is the role of tools such as personas and scenarios; they work to ground the project in the real world, ensuring we don’t design in a vacuum.
User stories are collaborative design tools which help the team to think through what the project needs to deliver from the perspective of those who will use it. User stories are generated by means of a critical translation of all existing project information (e.g scope, project objectives, business requirements, content analysis, comparative analysis, brand guidelines).
User stories (derived from agile development practices) are short statements that include the role of the user and the activity they wish to perform: the achievement of some goal, in the context of some constraint. They articulate the future system from the perspective of those who will use it (see examples below). Personas and scenarios provide supporting background and context.
It is common in the early stages of design for clients to communicate a solution as a way of communicating an intention. E.g. “users can see their shopping cart from every page on the site”. What we want at the start of the design process, however, is not a proposed solution but rather a clear understanding of what the project, and the users, are trying to achieve. User stories place the focus on what the user is trying to do, not how the system delivers it. User stories frame the problem space without identifying the solution.
…clients are prompted to rank user stories, using the MoSCoW_Method of method of Must Have, Should Have, Could Have, Wont Have . This means all issues are captured for future reference, but the most important issues are clearly stated and agreed to by all.
Our role in this process is to facilitate the discussion and guide decision making so that agreed project goals, primary stakeholders and prioritized user stories align and support each other. Sometimes a user story will appear important, yet it won’t align with the stated objectives. In this case it is our role to ask questions like: “This user story doesn’t support you to meet your currently stated objectives, so does the user story need to be re-prioritized, or do the objectives need to change?
Reading through the user stories gives a much clearer sense of “what the project is” than lists of features or content and functional requirements.
…user stories fundamentally shift the perspective of the project from a list of abstract (and potentially arbitrary) requirements to a description of user focused activities; these are necessarily more concrete and tangible and allow the stakeholder team to conceive of the project in different ways.
- Penny Hagen & Michelle Gilmore
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