UXLx 2017 — Day 4 — User Story Mapping & Articulating Design Decisions
Last day workshops were pretty awesome and I finally share my notes from. Structure will be same as in previous articles — short summary and then list of things I want to remember or I felt that they are somehow important.
User Story Mapping — Jeff Patton
“Software development has been steered wrong by the word ‘requirement’, defined in the dictionary as ‘something mandatory or obligatory’. The word carries a connotation of absolutism and permanence, inhibitors to embracing change. And the word ‘requirement’ is just plain wrong.” — Kent Beck
Summary
This workshop was a great exercise on prioritization. It was very well prepared and this allowed us to focus more on the things Jeff wanted to. At first, we created a journey map for our morning. Then Jeff added another conditions — that we have only 10 minutes to get out from the house. This showed what parts of our morning wasn’t so important and helped us create MVP of our morning. In the other example, we assigned stories to personas. It helped us to realize which parts of your product are important for more target groups.
Things I want to remember
- Stop enhancing documents and tell me a story. Shared documents are not shared understanding.
- Problem is that most people in software development start with an idea.
- Our job is to build less. We need to minimize output and maximize outcome and impact.
“Try to read your kids a backlog before going to sleep. It’s not a story.” — Jeff Patton
- 4 rules of collaboration
1) visualize your thinking
2) timebox & satisfaction (“It’s good enough for now”)
3) don’t think too much (intuition over analysis)
4) talk less - User story format “As a user, I want to … because …” is great for beginners. It’s not the best practice, it’s learning template.
- Don’t ask for permission. Just do it.
- User story map is just bunch of small stories binded together.
- User story mapping is not UX job, it’s not engineers or PM job. It’s a job.
- Journey mapping is a great communication tool for your team, but don’t forget to test them with target users.
- Vision and strategy drives prioritization.
- User story maps are best to build in the smaller collaborative group.
- The secret to prioritization: NEVER start with features.
- The strategy is not what features we want to build. It’s focus on what problems we want to solve.
Jeff promised that he will publish all drawings from his presentation, but if you don't want to wait, you can download them here.
Articulating Design Decisions — Tom Greever
“We don’t want to create the environment where everybody accepts our solutions and recommendations. We want to get the mutual agreement.” — Tom Greever
Summary
Great workshop on communication with stakeholders. A lot of practical exercises, awesome advice how to communicate with stakeholders and what to focus the most. It was a lot about preparation, listening and how to respond.
Things I want to remember
- It’s good to set up collaboration rules on the start of the workshop.
- If you can’t get approval to your design, it doesn’t matter how beautiful it is.
- Writing something down means a lot to other people. (“I write and we get back to it later.”)
- Don’t present your designs as the permanent solution. Be open to changes.
- When you discussing design, keep reminding goals.
- Be sure that you ask enough questions.
- Be sure that you all talk the same vocabulary.
- Identify who your stakeholders are and what they value. Define their use cases. Then focus on it.
- Visualize vision, eg. you can create hi-fi prototype how your product can be in 2 years.
- People are most likely to remember things from start and from the end of the presentation.
- People remember surprises and repetitions.
- Nice tip: create notes from your daily standups. You can go back to them in later discussions.
- Don’t go straight away to explanation. It can sound defensive and as an excuse.
- React positively, start with “Yes.” and then continue. Don’t continue with “but”, though.
- The best way how to learn to listen to people is pretending that you are listening to them.
- Don’t take stakeholders comments personally. Even when she says “you have this color here”, it probably si not pointed to you directly, but to the design.
- IDEAL response has all these parts:
Identify the problem
Describe your solution
Empathize with the user
Appeal to the business
Lock in agreement - If you don’t know the answer, postpone the conversation. Don’t rush into the answer without preparation.
- Don’t surprise people with your reaction. Prepare them in advance.
- Sometimes we forget how human we are. And how human they are.
And that's all for UXLx 2017. The content was quite great, networking with other designers even better. If you missed my notes from first 3 days, there are they:
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