Story mapping is fostering communication

Story Mapping, first conceptualized by Jeff Patton in 2007, is not an isolated task but team work. It fosters communication, helps to create a common understanding across team members and can be a powerful tool in stakeholder alignments.

Sometimes when people talk about concepts, they might use the same words but have totally different images in mind. With Story Mapping the User Journey is made transparent and therefore, abstract ideas become tangible.

In a nutshell the whole process is targeted to first understand why someone needs to do something and what milestones are needed to achieve the overall objective. Not only does this process help to understand a whole flow but also makes opportunies and gaps visible.

Having the process mapped out, it is easy to zoom in and out whenever needed. It also creates an overview of the must-haves, nice-to-haves and should-haves.

User Journey

What is a User Journey?

A User or Customer Journey Map shows in a horizontal flow all activities needed for a particular user type (persona) to get a certain job done. Each activity is a goal or milestone in itself and consists of smaller steps. You can think of a User Journey Map as string of smaller goals or milestones that can be achieved in the quest to reach an overarching objective.

In this article we will not cover the full potential of Journey Mapping and instead focus on the structure of a journey map to illustrate the process of the mapping technique itself. User Journey Mapping is often one of the first activities to build products or services in a customer centered way and serves as foundation together with other techniques such as Service Blueprints, Jobs-to-be-Done (Jim Kalbach), Personas and can easily be extended with past and future states.

How to create a User Journey?

Sometimes it feels hard to break a job down into distinct activities (aka user goals or milestones) and it usually takes a few revisions until a coherent journey is created. Luckily this process can be simplified by thinking about the shifting mental modes and separate goals needed to achieve the overarching target. I will use the following simplified example to illustrate the process:

Process

When we want to book our accommodation, then we need to find a hotel, and we have to choose a hotel based on their offers and location, and finally we make a room reservation.

• Find potential hotels
• Compare hotels
• Choose one hotel
• Make a reservation

Thinking modes

Each goal requires a different mindset: when I am looking for hotels, I am in a different thinking mode than when I am comparing and choosing a hotel or when I am making a reservation. Creating a User Journey Map based on mindset shifts makes it easier to create empathy for the user and to split a journey into separate activities.

Thought process

The overall thought process of doing something is also referred to as Backbone or Narrative Flow. In other words, the Backbone is a set of activities (user goals, milestones) that form a complete storyline together.

Another way is to imagine an end-to-end process and to discover and map each single step that is a milestone in itself for the user.

Where does a User Journey Map start and end?

When you map your users journey don’t limit yourself to the solution you offer. On the contrary, think about the whole end-to-end flow from the user perspective.

The goal of our users is to get their job (or task) done. Interacting with your company is usually not the primary target of your customers. Instead, the customer wants to achieve an overarching goal and your product or service is just a means to an end.

User Goals and User Steps

User goals

User goals (aka milestones or activities) reflect the different mental modes of the user.

User steps

User steps, events or tasks are synonymously used to reflect the various thoughts of the user within a given user goal. The idea is to group all user steps which lead to a common goal.

In the beginning of the process, you will mix user steps and user goals as you have to find out what belongs together. You are not doing anything wrong – it is part of the process to make the overall narrative flow visible and this requires some iterations.

Scenarios

One common problem with User Journeys is the question of conditionals: how to deal with activities that might or might not occur? It can become quite overwhelming to map out each condition. Therefore, it helps to include scenarios in the User Journey.

A scenario is simply an activity or a set of activities that might or might not occur. For example, there will always be some differences between new and existing users.

Alternatives

Looking at the user segmentation there is always more than one user type (persona). Once the flow for the most common persona is mapped out, you start adding flows for additional personas. You map only the differences for each persona.

To understand differences it helps to look at

• habits
• emotions
• decision-making
• needs (example: reduce time to find hotels…)
• circumstances (example: travel together with grandparents, the kids of our friends will join, first time we go to this destination…)
• (…)

Critical Path

In project management the critical path is defined as the shortest time possible to fully complete a project. We can project this definition onto our User Journey: what are the critical user steps that must be delivered that we generate the expected minimum value for the user. While the happy path/flow is usually the scenario where all potential errors are excluded, the critical path is the flow where all critical steps are met. You can also think about the minimum that is needed to deliver a certain user goal or to satisfy the relevant user needs associated with a user goal.

Opportunities

Based on all the insights you have collected from your customers and their users you start mapping pains and gains:

• Pains: issues, problems, work-arounds
• Gains: what should be continued, because it delivers already value to the users?

Pains and gains are opportunities that help to further build your product.

Once an opportunitiy is identified, you can map User Stories along the User Journey. This is also referred as User Story Map:

User Story Map

The User Journey is the head that presents the narrative flow of user goals and steps the user needs to conduct to achieve those goals. Now it is time to add the next layer – the body.

Therefore, a story map consists of two parts:

1. Head: understand and map the User Journey – who? / why?
2. Body: define the specific stories along this journey – what?

At this stage you ask questions like

• What are the specific tasks the user needs to do here?
• What if things go wrong?
• (…)

We are shifting our focus from Why is it needed? towards shaping the solution assumption by asking How will it be done? and What are the concrete tasks?

Prioritization

Now it is time to prioritize the user stories based on assumed outcomes. Be aware that you don’t confuse outcomes with features. Usually, a feature is a self-contained solution you offer. Thinking in features leads teams to focus on their product instead of real user needs. To keep us connected to the users we ask how our stories will help our users to achieve their goals – how the user stories contribute to the outcome we want to achieve for the user. The critical path provides you with an understanding of the essential user steps that must be fulfilled. Now you ask what detailed tasks are necessary to meet these steps.

There are many ways how to cluster prioritization. One approach is to differentiate between must-haves, should-haves and nice-to-haves. You get more granularity when you use the MoSCoW method and you need to find a clustering system that is easily understandable in your team.

Ideally the first cluster corresponds with the minimum viable product (MVP). This is the smallest product we can build in order to test if our solution assumptions will create the desired outcome for our users (Cf. Eric Ries: Build-Measure-Learn-Loop). Mapping the stories in this way will also give you a first idea how to test each user step. Testing means that you have clear metrics in place to measure if a story will deliver the desired outcomes.

Release Plan

As a last step you can use the story map to show the release structure:

• Minimum Viable Product (MVP)
• Public Beta
• Release V1
• (…)