Why Your User Stories Are Killing Product Usability

Your user stories are killing product usability because they’re missing two critical components. Not only is product usability suffering, the absence of these two components is making product design all the more difficult. Here are two things you won’t find in any agile book or agile training course that’ll complete your user stories, simplify design and improve product usability.

The Objective of Writing User Stories

The main objective in writing user stories is to help product designers and engineers understand the job task the user is performing, the ideal outcome of performing that job task and the reason(s) the outcome is difficult or impossible to achieve.

What’s Missing From the Textbook Agile User Story?

Here’s the most common format for agile user stories, depending on which methodology you use.

As a [role], I want [goal] so that [benefit].

Can you guess what’s missing?

The first thing that’s missing is the user’s job. How can you design and build products that make users better at doing a specific job if you don’t know what it is?

The second thing that’s missing is the reason the user has difficulty getting the desired outcome or goal when doing the job.

Here’s the worst part of the textbook user story. You can spend a ton of time, effort, sweat and tears creating product features that help users accomplish a goal and realize a benefit without eliminating the problems or obstacles that currently make it so difficult.

It’s one of the biggest reasons so many products are bloated with features yet fail to make it easier for their users to get the desired outcome on any given job. Those products haven’t eliminated the biggest obstacles to that outcome because it wasn’t part of the user story. How would designers and engineers know what to aim for without those components?

Your New & Improved User Story Format

Add these two components to your user stories and imagine the clarity it’ll bring to your functional specs, product design, and ultimately product usability.

Keep in mind, the ultimate goal of your product is to make users better at their job in ways that can be quantified.

In order to do that, it’s important to know [the job they’re doing] and [the obstacles that keep them from doing it better].

Here’s your new and improved user story format.

As a [role], I want to [job name] so that [ideal outcome/goal] without [obstacles that currently make this outcome difficult or impossible].

Example: As an [accounts receivable manager], I want to [contact the most delinquent accounts] so that [we reduce DSO] without [spending so much time looking through every account every day to figure out who they are].

Here’s the point.

If the user job and the obstacles standing in the way of quantifiably improving that job aren’t crystal clear, product design will be more challenging and product usability will suffer.

If there are multiple roles that perform the same exact job, want the same exact outcome and have the same exact obstacles, you can drop [role] from your user story and just start with [I], as in “I want to…”

If you’re looking for the bigger WHY in the example above, as in why do we care about improving DSO (days sales outstanding) in the first place, it’s one level up in your epic, where you start connecting tactical user jobs to something more strategic to the customer, like “improving cash flow so they don’t have to rely on lines of credit to keep the business running.”

If you want to learn more unique best practices like this for B2B, try our Free Product Management 101 Basic Skills Course for an unconventional and simpler approach to delivering customer value. Get our User Story Template including what-if scenarios, along with the video lesson when you enroll.

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