User Story Mapping

I’m an artist. You don’t have to tell me twice that visualizing a story is better than telling or writing it. There’s an art to all three: listen to an audio book or read it yourself and you can enjoy hours of colorful frame-by-frame in your head, with the freedom of feeling like you are deciding the storyline. But watch a movie, a vision of the story that was put together by a team of experts, and the previous depiction you had in mind is completely replaced. There are people who enjoy both.

But when it comes to software and deliverables, there is no room for “beauty in interpretation,” or even trusting the director to get it right (I mean look at the first Percy Jackson movie). Like Jeff said, it’s about changing the world and making impact in your own organization. The people who are writing the story are directly affected by it.

Visual thinking isn’t just for artists. I really enjoyed the comic that was put in the chapter because it really shows how misunderstandings of one thing can be cleared up with an image. The amount of times I tried to explain something (even math) in pictures and diagrams and maps has, hopefully, proved to be beneficial for that project in the long run.

Documents are overrated! You can convey the same story through a visual timeline, with just the important words. Maybe if I ever work at Amazon I’ll see if they’d be ok with that.

In terms of how this approach differs to my current design process is that I currently don’t “draw out” meetings or revisions. I may sketch out a concept or story, or when my team is discussing together we’ll use whiteboards and sticky notes, but on virtual meetings it’s harder to collaborate, so I tend to just jot stuff down. I don’t end up revisiting my meeting notes, though — they’re kind of hard to read. Revisions are the same — if I’m getting feedback on something, I’ll jot it down on the side. If it were in person, it would be like a sticky note.

So my question is this: how can we story map efficiently with virtual means, or on a video call?