Create informative user stories for your team

What are the user stories?

In traditional product development processes, teams often communicate with each other through lengthy and general briefs that nobody has time to read or to analyze. The alternative that was born along with Agile ideas is user-story mapping. It aims to help teams in addressing customers’ needs in a better and more creative way, without being restricted by stifling briefs and losing sight of a bigger picture.

The basic premise of a user story is to describe the functionalities and/or flow of the product through the eyes of the person who will actually use it.

What is the template of a user story?

1. Activities – high-level tasks that users want to complete, i.e. transferring money to someone, checking the state of current payments
2. Steps – specific subtasks needed to complete the activity presented in sequential order, i.e.
   1. Enter login details
   2. Enter the amount of money
   3. Enter the receiver of the money
   4. Name the transfer
   5. Confirm the transfer
3. Details – a more detailed look at each step, i.e. entering login details would be split into entering the client’s ID and entering a password.

Evolving the steps into a user-based narrative

Steps outlined in the earlier part are put together to create a user story, either of a high-level or a low-level. It should describe a product or a feature and highlight the value it provides to the user. An example of a high-level story would be:

As an owner of the bank account, I wish to transfer money to my friend, so I don’t have to meet him personally.

A low-level story would look similar, although it concerns smaller user experience elements.

As an owner of the bank account, I wish to save my friend’s data, so I don’t have to manually enter it every time I send him money.

As you can see, high-level stories are all about important features or products which ultimately change our life. A low-level story is something to be implemented within the improvement processes and it doesn’t impact the user’s life as much, although the feature described in this story definitely improves the quality of his experience.

The user stories lead to the creation of a minimum viable product

Describing why each feature is important in this way allows the team to prioritize implementations that will have a large impact on user experience over those which can be introduced later but definitely won’t change the whole concept. This way, steps needed to create a minimum viable product can be outlined and executed.