User journey map is a visualization of an individual’s relationships with a product/brand over time and across different channels.
- commonly it’s represented as a timeline of all touch points between a user and a product
- timeline contains information about all channels that users use to interact with a product
- visualizes how a user interacts with a product and allows designers to see a product from a user’s point of view
- Personas
An Inception is a collaborative design process for a group of stakeholders to share the same understanding about an upcoming project. One of the key objectives of a project inception is to collect requirements collaboratively.
- discuss the vision of the project / product (where do you want to see your project / product in ~1 year?)
- discuss the specific business problem we are trying to solve (here comes the persona, user journey... into play)
- solutionizing this problem statemen (how can we provide a solution to the problem, dependency & risk discussion, technical aspect of it...)
- plan the execution - e.g. how are we going to execute the solution, come up with a road map for the next 6 months
Besides:
- focuses more on the "why" than on the "how"
- the project team would get together for a few weeks, going through many activities prior to starting the delivery work: this was the inception.
- the leanest amount of work that you have to do before starting an agile project
- generate alignment between the business and the technical people
- create an ordered list of user stories with estimates together with a release plan
- Introduction
- Write the Product Vision
- The product is / is not, does / does not
- Describe the Personas
- Discover the Features
- Technical, UX and Business Review
- Show the User Journeys
- Display Features in Journeys
- Sequence in Features
- Build the MVP Canvas
- Explain what an inception is
- Explain the journey through the inception
- Define expected outcome / goals
- Ask for hopes and fears
Template:
For [final client],
whose [problem that needs to be solved],
the [name of the product]
is a [product category]
that [key-benefits, reason to buy it].
Different from [competition or current alternative], our product [key-difference].
- write above template of the product vision on a whiteboard
- form several groups
- have each of them fill out the template
- collect proposals and fill in the gaps
- agree upon a unique sentence
Facilitate the discussion about the description of a product by telling what the thing is not or what it shouldn't do.
How to do it:
-
provide a canvas with 4 quadrants:
the | the product | product is | is not ---------+----------- the | the product | product does | is does not -
ask each participant to describe the products on Post Its and put them on the corresponding areas
-
read and group similar ones
Afterwards:
- ask each person to write down the 3 key objectives of the product
- collect and cluster them
- ask the team to come up with a consented, ordered list of objectives. Objectives need to be prioritized, some will not make it, you will get to the main priority of the product
Trade off sliders:
- let the team decide on trade offs, e.g. what is negotiable and what not ** time ** design ** budget ** security ** ...
- come up with Trade-off sliders
- Elevator Pitch
- Stakeholder Map - 2 dimensional digram characterizing users of the system. One dimension is the interest, the other dimension is the influence. You should focus on the top right quadrant.
- User Relationship Matrix - depicts how one user interact with another. Determines the users' importance. Helps understand their importance.
- Dependency Analysis - since user goals have to be prioritized, understanding the dependencies between goals helps us to find the right priority rather than coming up with intuitive decisions.
- My tweet asking for games
- https://www.thoughtworks.com/de/insights/blog/3-ways-add-design-thinking-inceptions
- https://martinfowler.com/articles/lean-inception/
- https://leanpub.com/tothepoint/ (the Lean Inception Book)
- Represents business value
- User’s perspective
- Placeholder for conversations
- Unit of work
- Can be estimated
- Can be tested
- Completed within an iteration
- Used to track progress
- Index card
- Initial Story List (ISL)
Unique ID: # Title: Priority:
Description:
As a <ROLE>
I want to <GOAL>
So that <VALUE>
Assumptions:
Estimate:
I will know this is complete, when...
Complexity: ...
Completeness: ...
Volatility: ...
Can be used to find appropriate size for a story.
I Independent N Negotiable V Valuable E Estimatable S Small T Testable
What we know or don't know about stories
R Risks A Assumptions I Issues D Dependencies
Story mapping is a top-down approach of requirement gathering and is represented as a tree. Story mapping starts from an overarching vision. A vision is achieved via goals. Goals are reached by completing activities. And to complete an activity, users needs to perform tasks. And these tasks can be transformed into user stories for software development.
Goals > Activities > Tasks > StoriesAlternative structure: User Journey - User driven approach helps to identify requirements from user perspective e.g. buyer, seller, administrator etc. The map is then structured as User
Goals > User Journeys > Actions > Stories
Steps to be taken while storymapping
- Talk and Doc
- Frame your idea
- Describe Customers and Users
- Tell your Users' Stories
- Explore Details and Options
- talk and doc - write down basic ideas / concepts / features / key insights on cards to facilitate later conversation about them write cards or sticky notes to externalize your thinking as you tell stories.
- anti-pattern: lots of ideas vaporize
- we say them, people nod, ideas are not written down. later on ideas come up again and we have to re-explain
- overcome by
- think - write - explain - place
- write down a few about your idea on a card or sticky note
- explain your idea to others while pointing to the sticky note / card
- place card / sticky note in a place where others can see / talk about / move around ...
- writing ideas on notes also helps you stay focused in a conversation since you don't have to remember your thoughts and can inject them later
Questions to ask:
- Why are you building this?
- Tell me about the benefits for you and for the people who will use this.
- What problems does it solve for those people and for you?
Focus on outcome not on output
Change order of cards to see people's reaction to it. Bring them in the order of importance.
Questions to ask:
- customers who would buy the product
- users who would use the product
- what benefits they would get
- why they would use the product
- what we thought they would do with it
Insight: always more to build than we have time and money for -> we can never build it all
Goal: minimize the amount we build
Question: Of all these different users and the things they want to do, if we were to focus on just one of those users, who would it be?
Differentiate between NOW and NOT NOW
- Let's assume the product is alive and talk about someone who's using it and start telling the story.
- Write the story on cards so that you can re-arrange them and add things.
- Order of cards eventually generates a sequence.
- Exercise helps to build a shared understanding
- Mapping your story helps you find holes in your thinking
- While describing stories, potentially new personas would come into play
- Talking about details and putting them on cards can help you with decomposition
- mantra for not getting lost in details: think mile wide and inch deep - in other words:
- Focus on the breadth of the story before diving into the depth.
After we’ve got the breadth of the story map in place, break down the details break down below them. We stop at each step in the user’s story and ask:
- What are the specific things they’d do here?
- What are alternative things they could do?
- What would make it really cool?
- What about when things go wrong?
- https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/user-story-mapping/9781491904893/ch01.html
- https://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/blog/story-mapping-visual-way-building-product-backlog
- https://manifesto.co.uk/user-story-mapping/
- https://nicocasel.net/resources/agile/Jeff-Patton_User-Story-Mapping-Discover-the-whole-story.pdf
Can be used for introduction and to get people motivated
- NASA Game
- Let every player paint an apple tree (or the problem cause if it is paintable) so that no one but themselve can see the painting of each player. Than let them put all of the paintings on a wall next to each other. Than compare them and reflect together on the differences.
- https://www.playspaceteam.com/ which is a card game
- https://intrinsify.de/product/play-change-das-kartenspiel-fuer-wirksame-arbeit-2018/
- Collaborative Origami
- Let them draw the frame and the tires of a bike. Easy - right? Wait until you see what they come up with.
- http://retromat.org
- Holiday + Hobby game: let each player write down their last vacation destination and one of their hobbies on a sticky (anonymously). Then put them on a board and have everyone decide which cards belong to whom.
- 1 truth and 1 lie - let people guess what's correct and what's not