Chapter 39. User Stories
Information Architecture is not always easy to explain. It helps if you can talk about it with your team and think about it easily in your own head. User stories help you do that.
A user story describes one possible path a user can take in your site or app. It should be short, but complete. You will need many user stories to describe your whole design.
A basic user story for Google.com might look like this:
The user arrives on the main search page.
The user can enter any search query and submit it with the mouse or keyboard.
The next page displays a list of search results with the most relevant results on top.
The user can click a link to go to the appropriate site, or they can navigate through more pages of results until they find something useful.
This is a little too simple, but you get the idea.
Notice that nothing in the story tells me specifically how to solve or design those actions, just that they are possible. The purpose of these stories is to describe flows. Sequences of user choices. Not the final UI.
If the flows are simple and effective, you are doing a good job (so far).
Managers often think user stories are a way to order UX from the designer, but that is absolutely wrong. Why? Because a user story is basically a list of features or functions, and that has a major effect on the final solution. The UX Designer writes user stories to communicate to the team, not the other way around. That would be like telling Bob Ross what colors to use! (I was gonna ...
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