I learned my design practices for a new product in CS147. There, we would come up with a topic in some domain (e.g., safety in the realm of public transportation) and conduct interviews to form “How Might We” (HMW) statements. These are the more big-picture ideas since we would be defining what we want to change for each person. From these HMWs, we could decide on tasks that our product would support. These tasks are pretty detached from one another but break a bigger idea down into more manageable pieces. After this, we would create a prototype that allows people to do the tasks, and we would conduct user testing and incorporate the feedback from testers into the next prototype. The testing and adjusting would happen in a loop from then onward.
The story mapping approach starts off with an idea of how to change the flow of someone’s life already formed and then breaks that down into clear individual tasks. It differs from the design processes I’ve used partly in that it seems to be going backward from an idea of a final product rather than trying to piece together different ways to help someone from what they tell you. It also ensures that every step in the user’s process is coherent and leads to the intended outcome. In the design processes I’ve used, tasks were just tasks shoved together, even if they didn’t all seem to fit with one another, and multiple team members may have had different ideas of what a defined task entailed (only to discover this discrepancy later and argue). Story mapping, on the other hand, has one task naturally branching to another in a clear flow, and the tasks are defined out loud in the context of everything else so that everyone is on the same page.
It seems that even if we come up with ideas through HMWs, we could use story mapping to complement our task-building phase. It would help us get from the bigger idea to our tasks for shared understanding among everyone on the team and a clear plan for how a person would use the product so that there aren’t “holes” or edge cases that will leave us stumped later on.
