As a UX designer,if you embrace Agile to use user stories it will help you to make your project more user-centric. If you are new to UX design, you may wonder how that is possible but if you examine the tool you will find that it is very simple to do so. User stories are considered to be very powerful element to incorporate in designing a user interface. This is because it raises the level of user experience.
Once you realize this and learn more about it then you will be more interested to apply this great design method in all of your projects which will in turn enhance the collaboration among all of your stakeholders due to the increased user experience.
When you learn more about Agile and UX and their relation you will come to know a lot of things such as:
- How Agile is so UX unfriendly
- How these two tactics cannot work together and
- What you can do to make the best of both?
Since it is very difficult to work on any software project, with such knowledge you will be able to overcome the challenges in your work and at the same time ensure that you collaborate with your users, stakeholders as well as all of the other disciplines.
Simple And Quick Design Method
If you want to follow a simple and quick UX design method then user stories are what you should focus on. These stories will help you to address many of the common issues and overcome the most dominating challenges that may arise throughout the design process. There are several reasons that you should use these user stories in your UX web design. A few of those reasons are:
- A user story being short, usually a one-sentence statement is more detailed and goal oriented
- User stories are the best collaborative design tools that are loved by all project stakeholders that participate in the definition and its sorting and
- These user stories focus on the perspective of those people who will use the project.
All these make these user stories more user-centric and the most effective philosophy to adopt it to the core of the process of developing the project.
Since it is a tool that comes from the agile development it is prudent to embrace these both. However, it is not the best option for your teams to make up user stories from anything and everything that you think without any research. Generally, user stories are much, much more than wiring about ‘me’ only. It is useful to use a little bit of imagination in the process but in order to make the user stories do real wonders, it is important that you keep in mind the fact that all users are not just like you.
Take lead on user stories’ definition
The best way to approach as a user researcher is to take lead on the definition of user stories. This will help you to in lots of ways such as:
- It will help you to bring out your personas
- It will help you to create fictitious users even
- It will help you to use user scenarios to the stories session and
- It will help you to build the correct frame for all your stakeholders.
However, if you do not have time or the resource to go through the user research phase you must make sure that you gather more info regarding the existing project as much as possible. This info may come in different forms and shapes such as:
- Logs
- User analytics
- Customer support
- Desktop research
- Competitive analysis and much more.
You must remember that as a user experience designer, you will actually act as the “voice” of the user while you are developing the project. Therefore, you will be better off if you surround yourself their reality as much as possible. This will enable you to translate the actual “user voice” into your user stories so that you can create a better impression in everyone’s minds.
Keep it simple and accessible
User stories should be ideally simple and accessible to be more effective. This is the same thing that you need to do in the use cases in the “old school” approach. User stories may remind you of those use cases as there are a few similarities between the two. However, it is the differences between the two that makes the user stories much more effective than the use cases.
- Use cases usually have a definite structure and grammar requirements which is why these are not a favored thing to participate in defining them by everyone.
- Ideally, user cases are written by the person or a team that is in charge or responsible for defining the fundamental specifications and the requirements.
- Typically, the use cases acts like a bridge between the client and user as well as the user and the team responsible for its development, well sometimes.
These limitations and differences of user cases and user stories may lead to horribly wrong translation even if the “tire swing” model is used to facilitate this. The user stories on the other hand are the most effective and perfect way to avoid such type of errors simply due to the focus and its simplicity. Therefore, user stores are more accessible and simple as compared to the user cases.
Relevance of grammar
Anyone involved in your development team can have a go at user stories provided that person has a little bit of the knowledge about the relevance of the precise grammar. These are:
- As a – This explains the one who benefits or the person who makes an action
- I want – The role of this is to refer to the action executed or to be executed
- So that – This refers to the additional value that the user receives from performing the specified action.
Remember, all these words may be very brief but makes a huge impact. It means the learning curve can be very short but the participatory design approach in the write-up of user stories can create a huge collaboration.