Agile methods emerged in the highly task-oriented world of enterprise software, where it made a good deal of sense to expect that a customer would be able to tell developers what features the software should contain. "I want to first be able to do this, then that, and then I want to see a list of the other thing." And thus User Stories were formed around that premise. Within that world, they’ve become incredibly powerful and nimble tools for team communication, planning, and more. But software products have moved well beyond those shores. Today’s software is often either too complex or too experience-oriented for customers to know what features to ask for, or worse, they think they know what to ask for, but that is based on a dated understanding of rapidly evolving interface paradigms. In this hybrid lecture/workshop, we’ll show how a UX-oriented approach to story development can help teams transform often fuzzy and emotion-oriented customer needs and desires into actual estimable features that a software team can build and deliver. We’ll also show how the old delivery-focused model of story development is highly revealing of the origins of Agile UX anti-patterns (e.g. the “feeding the beast” phenomenon), and how a UX-oriented approach can mitigate or eliminate much of it. Topics covered will include: * Methods for eliciting both feature and experience-oriented stories. * Mapping experience-oriented stories vs the more common storymapping. * Integrating UI exploration into story development. * From experience-oriented stories to dev-ready stories. * The UX of story estimating. * Stories and the product road map and MVP. * Stories and sprints/iterations. * Stories and the concept of Done vs Validated.
