What are user stories? What are some user stories examples? Do you have a user stories template?
I’ve seen these questions floating around the internet, and I haven’t seen a very comprehensive article on the topic, so I decided it was about time to create this all-encompassing guide to help you out.
User stories are short, one-sentence descriptions of features for your product that are told from the perspective of the user or customer.
In this section, we talk about how you can write user stories and how epics are related to them.
You can use the below as the user stories template:
As a [user type], I want to [user’s goal] so that [value to user].
Let’s break down this structure into 3 parts:
We’ll go into more detailed examples in the what user stories examples section, but here are a few to help you put these 3 sections together:
If you’re at this point, you might be asking, “How much granularity do I need to go into with these user stories?”
Generally speaking, you want to make them as small as possible in terms of the goal the user is trying to complete.
You can then list what features need to be created (tasks), who needs to do what, questions the team has, and more within each user story in order to mark it as complete.
Now then...you have these user stories that are small goals the user wants want to do, but how do you describe their bigger goals?
We call those epics.
Epics are the bigger tasks users are trying to accomplish. They’re made up of multiple user stories, ranging from a handful to hundreds of user stories.
Think of them as the bigger picture.
The user stories that make up the epic are the smaller objectives the user needs to complete in order to accomplish the larger goal at hand.
Here are a few epics examples with one of the possible user stories to go along with it:
We’ve now covered what are user stories and the user stories template. Let’s go over a user stories example in more detail through a scenario.
You might be wondering what the difference is between user stories vs tasks.
You need to remember that user stories are tasks the user wants to accomplish, not the tasks that the developers need to accomplish.
Let me give you an example.
You might have a user story that looks like this:
Some of the (development) tasks associated with it might include these:
If you’ve heard of user stories, you might also have heard of “the 3 C’s of user stories.”
This is what it means in its basic form:
In this example, let’s say we’re designing a job-searching website.
Sarah Xavier is a persona we’ve created who represents a large segment of our users.
Based on what we know about Sarah wanting a job at a newspaper company, we’ve created these epics and user stories.
Hopefully, you have a good enough understanding from these epic and user stories examples to create your own.
But why should you make user stories? Why take the time to write them out?
When you’re dealing with large and complex products, it’s easy to miss what exact features need to be created.
That’s where user stories come into play. User stories help you break down large and sometimes nebulous tasks into smaller, more manageable chunks.
You can now find features and functionality you would have otherwise forgotten to include.
Another value in user stories is that you’re mapping out what needs to be done. This helps you and your team later on when sizing how much work there will be.
So when your stakeholder or boss says you need this to be done “soon,” you can show them in detail that it’s a lot more work than they think and you can give a proper timeline.
And let’s not forget, user stories help you see the product through your users’ eyes. Remember, this product is not made for you and what you think users want without any evidence.
Your product is made for your users and what they need.
On agile scrum teams, the job of writing user stories normally lies with the product owner, or PO.
The product owner writes the user stories and places them in the product backlog, the stories are refined during the backlog refinement, and user stories are added to the sprint during sprint planning.
User stories also help the team estimate how many hours are required to finish work in a burndown chart, which is a graphical representation of how much work there is left to do versus the time it will take to do it.
This article isn’t really on agile or scrum, so I won’t go into too much detail on these topics.
That being said, every team member is usually involved in user stories and epics in one way or another in agile teams. It’s how the team knows what’s to come in the product’s development timeline.
When in an agile scrum team, user stories are created and refined before any developer develops it.
As mentioned in the previous section, the user story is created, refined in the backlog, then added to the sprint during sprint planning.
However, user stories aren’t limited to the agile scrum process.
I’ve seen UX design freelancers make the process their own by creating epics and user stories for their own design needs. User stories, UX, and agile aren’t tied
The point is to know if they provide enough value in order to use them for your project.
A good heuristic is this: if your project is complicated, requires a lot of features, or will require a lot of time, it may make sense for you to use user stories.
If your project is simple, user stories may not be necessary. The point of user stories is to distill down long or complicated tasks into smaller, more manageable pieces. So if you don’t have anything complicated, then there’s no need for this methodology.
If you find that there is in fact enough value in doing user stories, you should first make sure there’s enough research and data on your users to write user stories.
This is because your user stories are based on your user’s perspective. If no one on your team has actually talked to users or done any sort of research with them, then your user stories won’t be based on your user’s perspective, but rather your own.
If you have a UX designer on your team, they will probably have this research already done.
If you’re writing epics and user stories, you might want to start with a pen and post-its.
You can write epics on a single color of post-its and then user stories underneath them in another color.
If you’re making user stories online, here are two tools I’ve worked with:
However, you’re not limited to these tools. You can even use digital spreadsheets like Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets to make them.
