TRUSTED BY
What is story mapping?
Story mapping is to design a user-centric product, and easily create a visual backlog that everybody understands.
Story mapping is a simple way to create a product plan by breaking down the concept of a product idea.
Story mapping is to map requirements before starting a software development project.
How to make a story map
step by step?
Create user personas
Describe the main users of your product or service: find out their goals, pain points, typical skills, and personality traits.
Discover project goals
The first step is to focus on your potential customers. Summarize which goals the users achieve by using the product. Write each goal on an index card or post it, and arrange them into the logical order.
For example on an accommodation website, the goals can be: “find hotels in Florida”, “choose the best hotel, near to the beach”, “book a room for a week”
Map the user journey
After collecting the goals, retell the user journey. Identify the steps the user takes to fulfill her/his goal. Avoid mistakes by dutifully follow the narrative flow. Place the sticky notes into the second line, step-by-step. If you discover missing steps, just put it into the journey.
Sticky notes are a clever way to create small documents, but an online story mapping tool gives you more flexibility.
Write user stories
The next step is to find solutions for achieving the user steps. Through this process, you create "user stories". Initially, you can use the following template:
As a user , I want so that step.
Using the accommodation example, user stories are: “As a user, I want to find hotels for my holiday, so I start browsing the discounts and advertisements” or “As a user, I want to find hotels for the next week, so I start searching by date.” Brainstorm with your team to collect the most possible solutions and put all user stories under the related steps.
Prioritize your backlog
If the team was successful, the story map should be full of great ideas! User stories have different priority levels. Identify the most common behavior or the basic solution to the problem.
Organize user stories by priority and place the most important card at the top of the column. Discussing priorities with the customer is crucial, so be sure to stay connected with your partners.
Slice out the MVP
First, specify the smallest working part of the product, the Minimum Viable Product. It's always hard to choose the fewest tasks for a marketable product.
Try to complete the user journey by beginning with the most common or most easy-to-develop tasks. Just focus on completing at least one user journey. After that, try to organize the rest of the backlog into tangible pieces by drawing horizontal lines between cards.
If you add estimations to user stories, you can plan and schedule the whole development process release by release. This is one of the most important pieces of information, so that your customer or executive needs to calculate estimated delivery time and costs.
How to do story mapping?
User Story Mapping
How to start and how to get the most out of It?
Story map examples
An overview of the different types of story maps.
Unleash the power of
story mapping
StoriesOnBoard transforms your team’s collaborative workflow.
No more sticky notes, just a seamless planning process at your fingertips.
98.000
teams
160.000
story maps
200.000
satisfied users