Agile coach Steve Rogalsky explains that storymaps not only encourage iterative development (which is a key to evolving the design of a user experience), but also help with outward progress tracking-an added benefit for most visually oriented designers. Storymaps help with the planning, prioritizing, and visualizing of project work. They’re adaptable to a project’s needs and a team’s desires. In fact, I’ve used storymaps to track everything from content strategy work to the requirements refresh of a banking system. They work with all sort of activities and tasks. They help to flesh out what an entire project looks and feels like, illustrating how far your team has moved forward without trying to assign everything an ambiguous column.Īnd the best part about storymaps? You don’t have to use them strictly in agile environments. Storymaps are a great addition to any team’s project wall, whether next to in-use Kanban lanes or to-be design mockups. The photo below shows a story map in practice. In short, a storymap provides a visual representation of the overall piece of work you're trying to accomplish at a glance, rather than trying to keep it held up in documents. The only difference with storymaps is that instead of focusing on the day-to-day "flow" of a team's development pace, a storymap reveals how tasks relate to larger buckets of work, grouped by activity. As he explains, “oftware has a backbone and a skeleton-and your map shows it.”Īgile Alliance defines storymapping rather formally as “a more structured approach to release planning … consisting of ordering user stories along two independent dimensions.” At its most basic though, storymaps are large card arrangements, not too dissimilar to other walls used in software development. Patton has gone on to write about how storymapping and UX relate, championing storymapping as way to alleviate the lack of common understanding that comes with trying to tie agile and UX together. Storymaps are an agile tool originally conceived by Jeff Patton in 2005 and further explained in his 2008 article, “The new user story backlog is a map.” Let’s examine what storymaps are and then look at how to build one. As designers, we are uniquely poised to maximize the potential of storymaps to help visualize the status of our team’s work and bring in a new flavor of project management to the development kitchen. When it comes to keeping all of these elements in perspective, storymapping is a great technique that can help us focus on the bigger picture, while also keeping our wider stakeholder group (like developers and product owners) aware of the project’s progress. It’s also important not forget the UX debt we may have built up thanks to shoddy software practices. Kanban walls, status reports, risk logs … with so many project management tools, it's easy to fall into the complacent feeling that a project is staying on track. But keeping a project on-track in terms of enhanced user experience goes beyond just hitting that next release deadline: it’s also about adding value to the business and building features that matter to end users.
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