Chris Thorne

I have worked in many teams who define product and project requirements as user stories and acceptance criteria. What makes a good user story?

As a User I want to listen to a documentary programme from Radio 4 on my PC, so that I can increase my understanding of the subject of the documentary.

As an example, here is a bad user story:

I want to click on a ‘buy this’ link that adds the item to my shopping basket.

One of the easiest ways for us to assess a projects success during development is by using user stories and acceptance criteria. However, user stories seem to be very dependent on who has written them.

In my opinion, a good user story has the following characteristics:

* It defines Who needs this requirement met – for example the Product Manger, a Stakeholder, or the User.

If the team don’t know who the requirement is for, and we want to find out more about this requirement, who should we talk to? Knowing who is important, to help us get further understanding.

* It defines what is supposed to happen.

This is the surface requirement. Ideally there is some evidence, research or analysis to support this requirement. You might add this research as supporting notes for the story.

* It defines why it is supposed to happen – what is the benefit?

Defining why a requirement is important (the ‘So that’ part of the story) increases understanding of the underlying need, and can greatly help innovation.

For example, we know that in the above ‘radio 4 programme’ story, the goal of the user is to understand the subject better. Perhaps on the web, this can be accomplished in other ways than ‘listening to the programme’ (a solution might be simply providing some related links for the programme). If we just have 1/2 the story – eg ‘As a User I want to listen to a documentary programme from Radio 4 on my PC’ , without expressing why this is important, we miss the opportunity to innovate.

To further encourage innovation, I also try to remove any reference to how from a user story. Supporting notes for the story might suggest:

* When it is supposed to happen.

* Where it is supposed to happen.

* How it is supposed to happen – this is just an idea, but might be useful as inspiration for the team.

The keyword here is ’suggest’. If we dictate the How and When and Where then we have weakened the project teams ability to innovate. If we were working on a factory production line, a lack of innovation can be useful (although Toyota seem to have done quite well through innovating on the production line), but if we’re knowledge workers working on a project, one of the outcomes should be some innovation.

Improving user stories

‘I want to click on a ‘buy this’ link that adds the item to my shopping basket.’

The above is a restrictive user story. Lets try and improve it.

Start by adding who it is for:

As a user I want to click on a ‘buy this’ link that adds the item to my shopping basket.

Now we know that if we want further information about this story, we should talk to user experience staff, or audience research staff. They may have further research that explains this story.

Now we can remove the how from the story. In this case the ‘buy this’ link is defining how the story is to be implemented. Removing this we end up with:

As a user I want to add items to my shopping basket.

This shopping basket idea might be well understood, but we would do well to define its behavior better, just to be sure we will get what we want. The shopping basket concept has several features that are worth considering separately.

The underlying function of adding items to a shopping basket is to collect all items I want to buy in one place, so that I can review all my proposed purchases  and pay for them all at once.

As a user I want to collect all the items I want to buy, together in one place, so that I can review my proposed purchases and organise payment and delivery details for all of my shopping just once.

If we add a note to this user story ‘The one place that collects all items together might be a ’shopping basket’ then we’ve explained our idea, but also left it open to design staff to think about other solutions that satisfy the same story. For example, they might think about storing previous payment and delivery details, so that repeat visits to the site are even easier.

The other aspect of the basket is being able to add, remove and change the quantities of items I have collected, before I purchase them.

As a user I want to be able to add, remove and change the quantities of items I want to purchase without journeying back to each individual products page, so that it is easy to complete my shopping.

So now we have 2 user stories, but a clearer definition of the basket functionality, and a clearer definition of the underlying needs of the user.

Conclusions

Great user experiences (I’m going to say it, sorry) for example, those delivered by Apple, are partly successful because they have worked hard to answer not just the surface requirement, but the underlying need. Great user stories are the foundations on which experiences are built. Making sure those stories are solid, researched, and prescribed appropriately for the project aims is very very important. By making sure that a user story defines who, what and why we have the basis of a good story.

Keeping how out of the story gives a project important room to innovate.

Thanks for reading – let me know your comments.

I’ve been thinking about the project process recently. If we ask the wrong questions, we get the wrong answers, so what are the right questions?

How often do we check – is the right problem being solved?

I’ve recently read Gamestorming – an awesome book of exercises to fire your creative juices. Similarly, I’ve found Dan Roam’s ‘The back of the napkin‘ inspiring.

Both books include an exercise ‘The 6Ws’ which I think should be applied in the initial phase of any new business project or proposal.

What are The 6Ws ?

The 6Ws are: Who, What, When, Where, Why and How. For a given goal, each of these ‘W’s is the starting word of a question. Crucially, questions created for each of these W’s cannot be answered with a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Investigation of these questions leads to a better understanding of the goal, and the issues surrounding it.

An illustration of the 6Ws

Example problem: The carrot shop.

Suppose we have a new problem to solve, for example a shop sells carrots and asks us ‘How can we sell more carrots?’.

By asking questions beginning with one of the 6 Ws we can start to explore the problem. Is this the right question?

The below list took me 5 minutes to produce. By working quickly, we can focus on what the obvious questions are and hopefully therefore the important questions as well.

Carrot Shop: How can we sell more carrots?

Is this the right question? Let’s apply the 6Ws and find out:

• Who visits the shop?
• Who works in the shop?
• Who delivers the carrots?
• Who grows the carrots?
• Who buys carrots?
• Who could buy carrots that currently doesn’t?
• What are the features of a carrot?
• What types of carrot do we sell?
• What types of carrot can be grown?
• What do people use a carrot for?
• When do carrots grow?
• When do carrots get planted?
• When do people buy carrots?
• When do we receive the carrots?
• When do we sell the carrots?
• Where are the carrots grown?
• Where are the carrots stored?
• Why do buyers buy carrots?
• Why do we want to sell more carrots?
• How do carrots get grown?
• How do carrots get prepared?
• How do carrots get used?
• How are carrots presented for sale?
• How are carrots packaged?

I think the quality of business thinking about a new product or feature could be greatly improved by applying the 6ws at the earliest possible stage of a project. I suggest the 6Ws should be applied at the start of a new feature exploration, and before any user stories.

Just answering the questions raised forces the business to think critically about what the problem is they are trying to solve. Having asked these questions, does the problem still look like it is the best one to solve? Or does it suggest new, better opportunities?

Is ‘How can we sell more carrots?’ the correct question? In the Why section of the above, we ask ‘Why do we want to sell more carrots?’. By asking this basic question, we might well get the answer ‘to make more profit for the store’. So, perhaps a better question would be ‘We are a shop that sells carrots. How can we make more profit?’. Again, the 6Ws now suggest lots of ways to answer this new question.

As an example ‘What is a carrot?’ might be answered by ‘it is orange’ ‘it is a vegetable’ ‘it is a food used in cooking’ ‘it is a prop used at christmas to make a snowman’ ‘it is food for a pet’. So, new product opportunities – can we sell other vegetables? can we use or sell carrot recipes in store? Should we promote it at christmas as a thing to use in your snowman? Can we sell to pet owners?

Why I like the 6 Ws

* Its a framework that is old

There are records of this framework being used since 1st Century BC in Greece. Which suggests to me it has some value, if the framework has survived for this length of time.

* It feels like a solid set of lenses with which to review a stated goal

* It is as flexible or rigid as you need it to be

If your organisation, or a part of it, needs to ask specific questions, you can use the 6Ws to define those questions.

If you’re exploring a fuzzy goal, then you can start with each of the 6Ws. Given a particular W, what are the useful and interesting questions?

* Its strategic and tactical.

If you apply it to a tactical goal, it works, or you can apply it to define strategies.

A general set of the 6Ws for a project might be:

• Who is going to do the work?
• What are the roles and responsibilities of the people involved?
• What does success look like?
• What work is required, to achieve the project goals?
• What does this project depend on?
• When will the work be done?
• Where will the work be done?
• Why are we doing the project?
• How are we going to do the project?
• How can we measure success?
• How does this project fit with our strategic objectives?

I’ve seen these questions on every project I’ve taken part in, but some of the projects that have had problems have not had clearly defined answers to these questions.

* It can be easily understood and applied by teams with a variety of disciplines.

* It can be managed.

If the process of the 6Ws results in too many questions, a manager can prioritise the questions.

The most exciting reason for applying the 6Ws:

Using the 6W framework leads to better, and faster, understanding of the issues involved to achieve a goal.

A well defined goal should be able to answer questions for each of the 6W lenses. Once a goal is well defined, a clear supporting document – for example writing a creative brief, or a strategy document, or defining business objectives, a project plan,  or clear user stories and acceptance criteria becomes much easier.

The Desert Island Discs project had a very aggressive development plan. At several points in the project we had to work very quickly.

As usual, when working for  a large employer, there were many stakeholders, each of whom needed to be satisfied in order to achieve signoff.

One of the crunch points we found was when we were trying to achieve signoff on the wireframes. One of the designs that Magnetic North proposed was not accepted at the review meeting. We could have waited for another round of amends and another opportunity to get all the stakeholders in the room.

What we chose to do was a bit of (really bad) Origami .

We took multiple copies of the original wireframe, folding each wireframe to create individual components. Then we repositioned the components on the table. Once we had a layout we liked, we took a photo using a camera phone. You can see the photo we took below:

By doing this, we were able to achieve signoff quicker, because all of the stakeholders were able to signoff the origami wireframe, without needing to wait for another set of amends and wait for another chance to gather together.

You can see the final design of this page here.

Components of the original wireframe rearranged and then captured using an iphone camera.

One of the aspects I found most interesting this year was the number of Information Architects who are no longer Information Architects. They started off as one of them, and became a ‘Product Manager’. Christina Wodtke – a ‘big cheese’ in the Information Architecture community, was one of the founders of the Information Architecture Institute. Yet, look at her ‘linked in’ profile today and it says she is ‘Principal Product Manager’ at linked in.

One of the primary reasons seems to be that if you’re just an information architect in an organisation, the usability (one of the things you care about as an IA – don’t you?) of your work can be cut. Too often we see project managers decide that when something has to be cut, the something they choose to cut is the usability.

In an agile project process, it is easy to claim that you’ve answered a user story – ‘The user can add blah to a web page’. At the end of a sprint, the project manager can tick the box. Unfortunately, what isn’t documented is that when the sprint started slipping, the usability of the feature was compromised. You’ve shipped ‘lipstick on a pig’. Yes you can tick a box that say’s you’ve completed a user story, but your target users find the new feature hard to use, frustrating, and in some cases, they refuse to use that new feature that was supposed to have been built for them.

It is one of my frustrations that, in an age where companies like Apple show that prioritizing usability throughout the business can make you significant profits, project managers continue to see it as a ‘nice to have’ a ‘well, if we have time.’

What’s the answer?

Well, I have 2 suggestions:

1. In Agile sprints, user stories should include usability statements. For example ‘A user can add feature blah to the website within 30 seconds of starting the add feature blah process’. Perhaps this should be the second sprint – the first being ‘A user can add feature blah to a website’?

2. User experience professionals could, like Christina Wodtke, become product owners.

If you’re a product owner (or CEO of Apple) you get a lot more influence over what gets implemented.

As I suggest to my IA colleagues next time the usability of their product gets crippled by a project manager/scrum master, climb the greasy management pole…..when you call the shots, you can ensure usability is prioritised.