(Book Review) User Story Mapping, 1st Edition

Overview

Review Published: September, 2018.

From independent software consultant and agile-coach, Jeff Patton, comes an in-depth examination of how product teams can organize their discovered software requirements into a comprehensive roadmap.

From understanding the basic purpose of user-stories, to organizing them into a broad product plan that can be executed, this book provides a comprehensive set of tools, references, and techniques to help any product team come up with a rock-solid plan for success.

Rating:

4 / 5

(Great Content, Clear Presentation)

What does this score mean?

Difficulty:

Intermediate (Some experience with UX research methods is beneficial).

Length:

276 pages.

Where to Buy It:

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What's Good

A great resource for building product plans from UX research; this book gives a detailed overview of how you can map out a potential product according to user-needs discovered through UX research.
Provides lots of specific tools, techniques, and references for effective user-story mapping; once the author has taken us through the overview, he then proceeds to lay out specifically how each step in the user-story mapping process is accomplished and backs everything up with a set of comprehensive references (that can serve as further reading).
How to prioritize your product’s features and content; the author provides a useful framework for prioritizing what should be tackled first in larger projects, helping you and your team to design, develop, and deploy “minimum viable products” (MVPs) until you have something that can be released.

What Can Be Improved

Written from a software development point of view; while of great use to UX designers, the book often fails to appreciate the full spectrum of UX activities that can go into the described process (i.e. UX prototyping for usability-testing isn’t explicitly discussed, but should be).
Organization of the book is a bit haphazard; with the broad overview of the entire process being followed by a retread of the process in detail, it can be hard for readers to retain the exact context of what is being discussed.

The Bottom Line

A great resource for taking UX research and creating a successful product plan; this provides a roadmap to keep design/development efforts co-ordinated, keep stakeholders informed, and provides a yardstick for measuring you team’s progress.
For UX strategists & designers with some research experience; the techniques in this book can be readily incorporated into several different strategic UX design approaches (i.e. “Waterfall” product design, “Lean” UX, or some hybrid of the two) depending what your project needs, and will serve as a valuable reference throughout your career as long as you have the research chops to act on it.
A great value, but be prepared for additional research; at $35, this book is one you should have on your shelf, but to fully leverage the techniques inside you’ll need to do some more research to integrate it into your UX workflow (I’d recommend “Lean UX: Designing Great Products with Agile teams” as a good start).