From the course: Building and Mapping User Stories
What is a user story map?
From the course: Building and Mapping User Stories
What is a user story map?
- [Presenter] How can you plan a trip without using a map, especially when you're not familiar with the location you are going to? Before the great GPS was invented in the 1990s, a map was the only way people could find their way around. Today we use digital applications at Waze or Google Maps. They are digital, but they are still maps. Maps help us understand our destination's location, what it offers, and the distances between different places. With a map, you can create an itinerary that provides an excellent travel experience. Similarly, the map that I'm going to introduce to you in this video, is one that provides a visual understanding of the activities that create the most delightful user experience in a product. A User Story Map shows the sequence of activities supported by our product. The map reflects the customer's journey in the product with user stories. User stories are short descriptions of functionalities from the user's perspective, things that customers want for their desired product. Giving us some background information about the User Story Map tool, it was created in 2001 by Jeff Patton. He's known for the best selling book, "User Story Mapping," which explains a holistic approach to using stories in agile implementation without losing sight of the big picture. Jeff's objective was to find a better way to organize the activities that a product will have, all in to one map. As you can see, the map is a grid. The horizontal rows show the flow of the activities which are captured in epics, features, and user stories. They appear in the sequence in which they are performed by the user in the product. In this course, I am going to use an active project for HT Rental Car. Currently, the residents of a small country called Nemar can make car reservation in person only. This is very time-consuming for the customers and also costly for the rental car company. The HT Rental Car project will implement a website that lets the existing and prospective customers create an online account, manage their car reservation, and pick up the vehicle without seeing an agent. Isn't that wonderful? In the User Story Map created for HT Rental Car, the goal is to implement a website for online reservation. We can see the flow of activities, also known as epics, are listed on the the map. They are: Manage An Account, Reserve A Car, and so on. The vertical rows show the detail and priority of the user stories. They're set up in the order in which the product team should work on them. Equally important user stories are kept at the same level. So looking again at our User Story Map, it shows that, in the first product release, the user story Create An Employee Account should be implemented before Create A Customer Account. When creating a User Story Map, I like to focus on the business need, what the product does, the business value, and the flow of the activities. I put myself in the user's shoes to set the order in which the activities should be completed in the product. Now you have a clear understanding of a User Story Map and its components. Perhaps you are thinking of using it on your project, but still not sure if your team can benefit from the tool. Hang on. In the next video, I'll share with you the benefits of using the User Story Map tool on your team.