My Story Manager — From sketch to low-fi wireframe

Since I realized that I feel more comfortable by using my own pen-and-paper methodology to organize tasks in hierarchies, I started to develop a template or a kind of framework in order to make my life easier (and amusing).

In this other Medium post about conceptualization, I wrote a little about what I’m looking for in a “task manager” and, sadly, I’m not finding it.

So now I’m designing my own way to organize a project and here I am bringing to you a few desktop screens.

To start, let’s talk about journeys and stories

A journey is a project. Any kind of project. I’m using the word “journey” because is not limited to something you need to planning, run and archive. What I mean is… you can use this journey concept to set down a plan, or just to write some story, write your diary or take notes for a recipe. It’s your journey, so you can go whatever you want.

Stories, by the other hand, are task, events or steps that we need to reach or follow to “complete a journey”, develop a project or set down a plan.

But wait! I learned something in the early stage of this side-project: create and organize stories (in this case) are two different things. Each one has it’s own purpose so the main goal here is trying to not mix them because is quite confuse when that happens.

I made a lot of sketches in papers, boards, closet doors and walls (a really nice stage of the process) and now I’m rescuing this really basic concept sketch to give it some shape on screen.

Journeys and Stories need a CRUD to be alive

Journeys need a body, an identity — as well as Trello has their Boards or Google Keep their tags — . Stories need an identity too, so the question is how we create, read, update and delete journeys and stories, and how they look like.

I simplified my own pen-and-paper technique (I made some improvements in the process), and then I spent some time adapting and trying to make it feels natural on screen. Here is the result.

Journeys visualization

No much time invested in this screens. This is just a simple dashboard to organize journeys by using a mix between Keep and Trello patterns. And I’m sure this layout will change but meanwhile, here you go:

Stories visualizations

Here is “the magic”. There’s two different visualization modes to edit stories. One is the Writing Mode, where you can make text entry like in a text editor (with some different details), and each line of text is a story. The other one is the Tree Mode, where you can move the position or hierarchize each story.

Writing mode

Tree mode

And that’s all for now. With this delivering I think I finished with the conceptualization stage and now I need to go deep into user stories, usability, wireframes, mockups, prototyping and so on. So I think is going to take me a while. Do not miss me.

And if you like the project please let me know by lighting my heart :)
See you around!