How To Story Map — A Simple Example

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Journeys
To start with, we need to define the core user journeys in our product. It's important to truly think in terms of user journeys and not technical features. So, examples of some typical user journeys are as follows:
Buy a product
Register an account
Contact the business
Top up my balance
Learn about the brand
Request a call back
Download a book
Notice that these all begin with a verb, and they're all written from the user's perspective. This is not a hard and fast rule, but it really helps to get inside the mind of your user. Let's take "Buy a product" as our example. We need to to write this down, either on a post-it, or electronically — like so:
Our single journey. Simple so far, right?
Steps
Once you have a user journey established, you need to define the steps required to achieve the journey. Think of this as all the things the user will need to do from start to finish, at a fairly high level. So, in order to buy a product, the user might need to:
Select a product
Review product selection
Enter delivery details
Enter payment details
Purchase selection
This can be quite specific to your product. For example, if we had a particularly unique checkout process, this flow should be captured here. However — don't feel tempted to capture the smaller details like "address lookup" or "promo code", as this will all be picked up in user stories. Verbs work well here to, but feel free to tailor this to your own terminology and workflows.
Once you have your steps defined, you write them under the journey the sequence from left to right. In our example this will look like:
Steps from left to right
Awesome 😎— now we have a really clear outline of the user journey and how they can get from start to finish. Now is the fun part...
Stories
Our task is to now create placeholder user stories that fit into any one of the steps outlined above. The beauty here is that we are not committing to actually develop any of these stories yet, we are merely gathering ideas and requirements. This is a perfect time for stakeholder engagement. This exercise will raise collaborative discussions about how you can innovate along your journey. Some stories might be simple and obvious like:
Add to cart button
Change item quantity
Remove from cart button
Pay with debit/credit card
Order confirmation email notification
But, make sure you're open to innovation here and jot down more left-field ideas. For example:
Pay with Bitcoin/Ethereum
Scan item barcode from catalogue / in-store
View product on Oculus Rift / HTC Vive
Request live demo with hangouts
Story titles should be short and to the point, but not so short that they are not descriptive. There is no need to add story descriptions right now. We need to place the stories that we come up with in the column of the step that they relate to. In our case, that might look like this:
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Advantages of Story Mapping
Last modified 3yr ago
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Contents
Journeys
Steps
Stories