Design Validation with implicit user stories

How often where you asked to design feature with a the person asking you proudly proclaiming that they even added a user story to a request or ticket. What seems to be a good deal in the beginning turns out worse. Use stories are debated in the industry on medium on MarmeLab’s Blog, they have strength and weaknesses.

In short, you might get a false sense of security solely basing your design on single user story given by the person asking for a design. So what works for me?

Implicit user stories

I think of user stories given by the person asking for a design as a red thread that helps to points into a direction, but it might be a few degrees off from the best solution. This allows me to validate my design but I am aware that a bit of healthy judgement is needed.

After the initial research and before I start my design exploration, I sit down and note further smaller or implicit user stories. The initial request was to design how a user can write and publish a post on social media. Then my implicit user stories might be:

• “… able to abort writing and publishing the post”
• “…should display openGraph images for Links included”
• “…after publishing directly see the post”

I then treat the initial user story as the main target and use my own requirements as guard rails around the core request. Of course these guard rails are assumptions and should be clarified.

For large or complex feature I write more implicit user stories. Now I can be wildly creative creating concepts as my rational thoughts are put on paper. At any point I can take my list long list of guardrails and main goal and validate each concept.

Validate

When I validate my designs I try to play through all user stories. Some designs will be better at solving for one requirement, and worse at solving other requirements. This reveals valuable insights that you use when working on the next iteration.

Eventually you can compare your designs and see the character of each solution and you can choose or further develop your idea in a certain direction based on how you want the final character of this feature to be.