User stories also help us outline features and requirements through the use of a story. If it’s anything that’s enjoyable, we, as a culture, love telling and listening to a good story. So think of your UX Researcher or Analyst as a storyteller. Having a solid persona in place always benefits you whether you’re working in a traditional sense or a lean or agile (both are really the same thing) UX approach. Personally the same cannot be said for user stories in my opinion. Their use depends on the scale of the project or the setting of the client. They do make writing the experience documentation a little easier so you can clearly define the interaction design.
The basic structure of a user story should be along the lines of the following format:
As a ______ , I want to _______ , so that I can ______ .
This defines what the user is trying to do when accessing an application. A key part of the above story though seems a little impartial to me though “As a user”. Much like with your persona, if you’re writing user stories you can elicit the same emotional involvement. By making a slight modification to the story it comes off as more personable.
Now even the user stories themselves are centered on our persona of Karen Lominack, painting a consistent picture of what we are trying to accomplish. That consistency will help you out in the end no matter what the approach you try to begin your process with mobile first or content first.
Part of writing the user stories, gathering the wireframes, making the personas and outlining the requirements is the ability to create a traceability matrix. The matrix creates groups in which each user story has every item associated with it attached to that story. Think of it as a per project pattern library for Business Analysis and the entire team. This way is a question comes up or there is a disagreement or confusion about a feature, you can always refer back to the traceability matrix for answers.
As the UX Researcher it will save your bacon having to justify decisions with the development team and the product owner.
