In User Story Mapping, Jeff Patton presents a method of creating shared understanding that has emerged as an effective pattern across businesses and teams, and his method struck me as quite different from the design processes I’ve encountered in research and engineering internships. In the past, I’ve seen and worked on design for new systems primarily through design documents – polished, meticulously edited, and often tediously long documentation for new ideas and proposals. User impact was important, highlighted in its own section at the top of the first page, but mainly, these design docs focused on implementation – how something is required to be done rather than why it is done and who it serves.
It is also easy to misinterpret, leading to several meetings with other team members to hash out disagreements resulting from divergent understanding of the same text. Modifying the carefully prepared document can also sometimes feel almost painful, like ruining something beautiful to squeeze in an additional requirement or two. Patton’s story mapping method, in contrast, yields something I see as rougher around the edges, flexible rather than “perfect,” coalesced from the ideas of many different individuals instead of crafted by one. Moving index cards to represent a high-level story and details of each step is uniquely impactful in that it serves to convey a deep understanding of an idea, but is also much easier to modify and tinker with. It also highlights the why of design throughout the story map, where prioritization can be done collaboratively at each step simply by removing and replacing cards as a team.
