Product Management 101: #9 User Story Mapping

User story mapping is a visual exercise that helps product managers and their development teams define the work that will create the most delightful user experience. It is used to improve teams’ understanding of their customers and to prioritize work.

User-story mapping (also known as user-story maps, story maps, and story mapping) is a lean UX-mapping method, often practiced by Agile teams, that uses sticky notes and sketches to outline the interactions that the team expects users to go through to complete their goals in a digital product.

Jeff Patton popularized the method, which replaces the lengthy, technical requirement gathering and siloed updating processes found in waterfall development. Story maps are intended to spark collaboration and conversation among Agile team members, while providing them with the bigger picture of how the digital product flows and fits together. This latter quality of story maps is important in the Agile environment, because losing sight of the product as a whole is a common challenge, likely to arise when teams work from a discrete list of user stories in a backlog.

A user-story map depicts 3 types of actions at different granularity: activities (the most general actions), steps, and details (the most specific actions). User activities and steps display horizontally across the top of the map, and the details stack vertically underneath their respective steps in priority order. To define each level of a story map, we’ll use a feature for depositing checks through a bank’s mobile application as an example:

1. Activities represent the high-level tasks that users aim to complete in the digital product — for example, Check account balance or Deposit a check. Depending on the type of application or website you're creating, you may only have a few high-level activities. These can display in sequential order or in parallel if multiple paths for various user types exist. Exploratory research about top user tasks should inform this level of the map.
2. Steps sit directly underneath activities and also display in sequential order. They represent the specific subtasks that users will go through in the product to complete the activity above. For example, the activity, Deposit a check can be deconstructed into the steps of Enter mobile deposit details, Sign check, Photograph check, Submit deposit, and Confirm deposit.
3. Details are the third level of the story map and describe the lowest-granularity interactions that the team anticipates users will experience to complete the step above. For example, Enter username or email and Enter password appear as two separate details underneath the Log in step.

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