User Story Mapping: Discover the Whole Story, Build the Right Product

by Jeff Patton

Here are a few great ways to mess up a design process: Start without framing the business needs and target customer well. This’ll make it hard to prioritize who to focus on, and hard to tell if you’re finding a good solution. Spend a lot of time doing thorough research and making sense of what you’ve learned. You’ll never run out of things to learn—so why stop? Time-boxing might have been a good idea. Don’t spend any time at all talking to people and learning from them. After all, we’ve got a lot of data, and really, our solution ideas are great. We just need to get going on designing them. Fail to focus on specific problem, and instead try to solve lots of problems for lots of people. The more problems you solve the better, right? Except that big problems often result in big solutions. And trying to solve a problem for people with conflicting needs can result in a solution neither person likes. Consider multiple solutions, but only ask real designers to contribute solution ideas, because they’re the only ones trained to have good ideas. Don’t waste time considering multiple solutions, because the idea we have is so good. Beautifully craft a prototype that really looks real, but doesn’t work well enough for customers and users to really use it. After all, when they see it, they tell us it “looks really lovely.” Convince yourself and then others that this well-researched, professionally designed solution will work. After all, you’ve followed a rigorous design process. What ...