What’s in a user story?

The good news is you don’t have to make your user stories from scratch. Weed through customer feedback and user personas to help you slip into your customers’ shoes. You probably already have them sitting around, so refer back to them early and often.

Title

Well, you do want to name it something, don’t you?

User Story

The key is to impart this information:

• What is the user doing?
• What does the user want to achieve?
• Why do they want to achieve this?

This is the most popular format, but you don’t necessarily have to stick to it:

As a user, I want to x In order to y.

The goal is to communicate the context around what you want built so that devs can make decisions about how to implement it.

Acceptance criteria

Acceptance criteria is how you judge whether the user story has been done. Often it is just a bulleted list of things like “User can see x” or “User can enter y.” Essentially the acceptance criteria allows someone to come along, test and confirm whether the user story is working as expected.

Who writes user stories?

In Agile methodology the person writing the user stories is usually the product owner. If you have a PO, great!

Otherwise it often ends up being devs (or lead dev) breaking down an epic, project manager or product manager. UX teams are sometimes responsible for  user stories too, but not as often.

But they’re not the only ones who can (or should) write user stories. Everyone’s invited to this party!

It’s unlikely you’ll get marketing, sales or customer support interested in writing user stories on their own, but see if they’ll join you for a user stories session that you lead.

They talk to your customers all day long and if you prod them enough, they could bring up considerations you wouldn’t have thought yourself. Each team brings its own perspectives, and getting them involved will help you and your dev team tighten the final design of your product.

User stories – can’t live with ‘em, can’t build an awesome product without ‘em!

Looking for more PM advice? Try our product management blog for more top tips.

The post How To Write Great User Stories appeared first on ProdPad.

Understanding customers is about understanding people

One of the most valuable but perhaps most abstract changes that psychology brings to product is a different way of thinking about your users. At this year’s Mind the Product conference, Interaction and Experience Research Director for Intel – Genevieve Bell – shared with us an understanding of human behavior that could transform a product manager’s typical approach to their users. She highlighted that while we’re tempted to believe that changes in technology reflect changes in us as human beings, what makes us human in fact changes very slowly.

An appreciation of this bigger picture can make us better product managers. Genevieve herself – an anthropologist – is an example of Intel’s appreciation for a different outlook on understanding customers. And she’s not the only one; from psychology-led design consultancy Behaviour, to psychology graduate and founder of Fitbit Tim Roberts, many more with human behavior in their blood are turning their training to building and making products.

Don Norman even calls for changes to design education to better equip designers for the social experiences they are creating:

“In the early days of industrial design, the work was primarily focused upon physical products. Today, however, designers work on organizational structure and social problems, on interaction, service, and experience design. Many problems involve complex social and political issues. As a result, designers have become applied behavioral scientists, but they are woefully under-educated for the task.”

Of course, this doesn’t mean that every product manager needs to rush off back to school to get their psychology degree. But perhaps reading a book or article here or there, re-educating your team to consider the humanness of your customers, could give you the perspective you need to take your products from average to awesome.

Building sticky products is about habit forming

Getting into the heads of your users can be applied much more directly than a general approach to product, however. One of the industry’s leading thought leaders on the intersection between technology, business and psychology – Nir Eyal – also spoke to us at this year’s Mind the Product on the power of habit forming in your technology products.

“The hook is an experience designed to connect the user’s problem to your solution, with enough frequency to form habits.”

How Facebook, Twitter and other major technologies have exploded into our lives in the past few years is no pure coincidence. In theory, all product managers can use the science of habit forming to figure out how to trigger desired behavior in their users. Of course, that’s no simple task, but a little part of the brain called the nucleus accumbens can help to give us a head start. This stimulates the stress of desire, and it is these cravings that move us to action. Moving users to strive for rewards from your product, which might take the form of social, resource, mastery, or investment-based rewards can help you encourage them to come back again and again.

An example of this habits-based approach comes from Behaviour, who worked with psychologists at University College London to build behavioral insight into the design of an app for breast cancer charity CoppaFeel. Elements such as taking a pledge when starting the app to encourage a long-term commitment, and data on how many other users have ‘copped a feel’ for social proof, were developed to encourage young women to form a habit.

Perhaps an element of your product could be reimagined to encourage more habit-based behavior in the hunt for one of these basic human rewards.

Good products treat customers as humans at every step

As businesses we are sometimes guilty of investing all of our empathy for customers into the initial development of our products or marketing, but forgetting that these people face the same challenges when they’re using our products too. Kathy Sierra delivered a very strong message at Mind the Product, urging product people not to trade personas for stock photo images of their users after the sale.

When we’re trying to build great products it’s not just about motivating users, but keeping them on track in face of lagging willpower. So how can we overcome this derailment of our users? An important psychological concept to be mindful of when assessing your entire customer experience is cognitive leaks. Don’t suck away your users cognitive power when they’re trying to use your product; instead limit choice, provide clear instructions and support and offer clean feedback so your users’ brains can rest assured you’ve got it covered.

Don’t forget that your users never stop being the very human people that they are, and account for that at every stage of their customer journey.

The post The Psychology Behind Building Products: Psych-Savvy Product Management For Truly Human Technology appeared first on ProdPad.

A UX specialist saves us time

Both Janna and I knew that we’d lack the time to produce every wireframe and update all the interactions properly. Saving us time has not only freed us up for other aspects of this project, but it has saved everyone time across the entire team. If either or both of us were responsible for UX then the developers could only move as fast as we could get them updates. We wanted to remove ourselves as bottlenecks completely from the ProdPad Regeneration project

Not only would this lack of time have delayed how quickly we could move, but a patchy process of wireframing – executed when we could grab a spare 30 minutes – would have seriously limited the scope of what we could revamp and improve. Hiring a UX expert has helped us to avoid creating a disjointed UX experience; instead we’re developing something that’s focused and cohesive across the whole app.

A UX specialist offers fresh eyes

Like any founders, both Janna and I have been completely immersed in ProdPad for the last few years. We know too much about the logic that went behind any UX decisions, and we’ve adapted to all oddities. We applied as few constraints as possible for Mojca and we made it clear that we were keen for her to question absolutely everything.

We wanted the UX update for ProdPad’s regeneration to be a revolution instead of an evolution. By bringing in fresh eyes and a fresh perspective we opened up the redesign to wider possibilities, that Janna and I were just too close to see.

Which brings me to my last and most important reason

A UX specialist brings us real expertise

While Janna and I can do UX, there is a difference between doing this as product manager versus as a professional. We just don’t have the same knowledge and expertise as someone who’s studied UX in detail and worked on a huge number of projects for a huge variety of applications.

The expertise that Mojca has brought to the table has been the key component to allow a revolution for ProdPad’s UX in this project. Her expertise has offered us three key advantages over and above our efforts going it alone

1. Cohesive and comprehensive UX for interactions, right down to the smallest details
2. UX improvements that neither Janna and I would have thought of that push the boundaries of what I thought possible
3. A stronger foundation of intelligent design so that the UX of ProdPad will suit those just starting out and our advanced users alike

The UX improvements we’re going to bring about through the ProdPad Regenerated project certainly isn’t the end, but Mojca’s work has laid a fantastic foundation for us to continue to evolve and improve the UX of ProdPad in the future. We simply could not have done it without her help.
This experience has brought home for me the role that Product Managers play in the centre of tech, business and customer. While you need knowledge in all three areas yourself, knowing when to step back and bring in the expertise and coordinate with the other functions is even more important. Hiring a UX expert has not only helped us to see through this project, but it has made us better product managers.

If you’d like to find out more about how we’re regenerating ProdPad, or even to get onto the beta programme, get in touch with us here or on @prodpad

The post Why did we hire a UX specialist to regenerate ProdPad? appeared first on ProdPad.

The post Integrate, integrate, and integrate? Building Products for a Connected World appeared first on ProdPad.

3 UX principles for better product development

1. Start by eliminating the negative experiences

No matter what your starting data source – from usability testing to customer support feedback – identifying and removing your customers’ stumbling blocks is the first step towards offering them a better user experience. Removing friction to a seamless experience is an essential prerequisite before you can really start to create additional value. Product people have much to learn from the classic psychology principle of negative enforcement: removing adverse stimuli can reinforce behavior for your users to return again and again. And those adverse stimuli should be sought out at every step of the customer journey. Removing friction goes further than high-level problem-solving, and deeply understands user behavior to make sure that a good idea to solve a problem isn’t thwarted by sloppy execution.

[bctt tweet= “Removing friction is an essential prerequisite before you can start to create additional value.”]

2. Stay focused on long-term user goals

To remain experience-focused, product managers must continually seek to balance user and business needs. We could easily argue that this question of balance is misleading as ultimately, these are one and the same thing. Continually meeting their needs puts you in the strongest position to retain your users’ custom. But every product manager knows that day-to-day decisions aren’t immediately that simple. When faced with short-term commercial concerns, technical objectives and even pure asthetics, it’s easy to lose sight of your raison d’être – long-term business success. Paul Brooks has neatly adapted the Steve Covey time management quadrant for this balance, where intelligent design is the sweet spot for meeting long-term goals.

3. Be one step ahead with proactive experiences

Living and breathing your users’ needs means that you can delight customers with proactive user experience design. Going a step further than removing friction, you can actually anticipate where your customers will encounter problems before they come to you with them. Ensure that the products you build guide your users rather than provide them with information to figure it out themselves. And to really meet their long-term goals, dedicate time to imagine features that go beyond the expected. A completely comprehensive approach to user experience considers every possible angle and aims to never leave customers waiting for more.

[Tweet “User Experience isn’t just for UX Designers”]

Limited time bonus! Join us for the Lean UX workshop on Thursday, September 11th in London. Claim your 15% discount here (good for two workshops).

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Steve Kondik was a not-so-typical late night tinkerer who was more than just a little pleased with Google’s decision to go open-source. On May 25th, 2009, he innocently posted his custom version of Android on the well-known Android forum, XDA. What followed is a lesson in creative, albeit organic, product management.

Steve learned that uploading his code to XDA quickly created a pool of users who would provide him feedback in near real-time. These users would also take Steve’s code and change or expand upon it, and then post their changes. It was game on. As Steve himself puts it:

Sometimes I would upload multiple versions in a single day to fix bugs. And the competition was fierce – lots of original work, and also mods of your mod, and mods of your mod’s mod. It was a lot of fun. We all shared the same idea – there was a product we wanted, nobody would make it, so we did it ourselves at any cost. This idea became the ethos of our community.

Steve began publishing his new work on Github, other developers began contributing directly to his work, and a team was born. Named after Steve’s whimsical XDA username, CyanogenMod became a team, within a community, in the midst of an open-source success story. (Steve calls it a revolution…)

Open Source: Product Management on Steroids

Open source product management inherently results in building what the users want, rather than building towards a potentially misguided company vision. Coupled with the ability to make their own changes, this results in the ultimate customer development feedback loop.

Years of collaboration using Github for the code, and XDA for the community support, was product management genius. The team became so efficient that a new version of their code was (and is) published every single night—a very rare occurrence in any industry. It did not go unnoticed.

In late 2012, Steve was introduced to some potential investors in Silicon Valley; it went well. A meeting was scheduled, papers were signed, a large sum of money was designated, and on December 12th, 2012, Cyanogen Inc. was born. Less than a year later, Oppo, a Chinese cell phone company announced the very first factory phone with Cyanogen.

This story is far from over but probably never would have gotten off of the ground floor had Steve not made the product management decisions that he did. ProdPad can assist you in making some of these very same decisions, allowing your team to collaborate in real time, edit, submit new ideas and feature requests, stay up-to-date on progress, and more.

Is your team going to be the next great success story? Why not? Contact us for more information and follow us on @ProdPad for news and updates.

The post Creative Product Management – A Story of Open Source Success appeared first on ProdPad.