User Story Maps and Wireframes

In Agile, user story maps are a holistic view of your product backlog. A product backlog is a repository of requirements for the releases of the product. The user story map is focused on the user experience target outcomes and identifying the best way to ‘slice’ your product releases by minimal viable product (MVP). A MVP center around the business perspective. It asks the question “what is the minimum product I have to build to figure out whether I have a business?” An MVP is a fast way to gather customer feedback while doing continuous development.

Building a user story map helps to focus on the big picture – the product as a whole instead of getting myopically focused on an individual story. Creating user maps forces us to think about our solution from our customers’ objectives rather than what the system does. Being able to explain the big picture helps your stakeholders and developers have a better understanding of your overall solution and the market problem that you are solving.

Wireframes are a tool that helps us evaluate the general workflow navigation, information grouping, information hierarchy, terminology, labels, and general interactions in terms of activities and tasks that need to be complete to meet the customers’ goals.

Wireframes are a type of prototype used to solicit feedback from subject matter experts to ensure you are solving the right problem, to inform stakeholders, get feedback from your customers, and collaborate with development. This will help stakeholders better support your efforts and they may know something from their discipline that could enhance what you are doing. For example, perhaps someone from engineering knows about a new method, technique or technology that can improve the solution. Maybe someone in Legal knows of a new regulation that is coming up that we can address now in this solution.