User Story Mapping

Foreword by Alan Cooper

Alan Cooper

June 17, 2014

In Mary Shelley’s famous science-fiction novel, Frankenstein, the mad Doctor Frankenstein builds a creature from disparate pieces of dead humans and brings the creature to life with the then-new technology of electricity. Of course, we know that this is not actually possible. You cannot create life by sewing together random body parts.

Yet this is what software developers attempt to do all the time. They add good features to software, one at a time, and then wonder why few users love their product. The heart of the conundrum is that developers are using their construction method as a design tool, but the two are not interchangeable.

It’s entirely reasonable that programmers build software one feature at a time. That’s a perfectly good strategy, proven over the years. What has also been proven over the years is that, when used as a method for designing the behavior and scope of a digital product, one-feature-at-a-time yields a Frankenstein monster of a program.

While they are intimately related, the practice of designing software behavior and the practice of building that software are distinctly different, and are typically performed by different people with different skill sets. The many hours that interaction designers spend observing users and mapping behavior patterns would drive most programmers batty. Conversely, the hours of sweating over algorithms are too solitary for most designers.

But when the two strains of practice—design ...