Class Activity: User Story

User stories are a simple, but powerful way to capture requirements when doing systems analysis and development.

The level of detail, and the specific narrative style will vary greatly on the intended audience. For example,if we want to create a user story for accessing data stored in our repository we will need to think closely about different types of users, their skills, the ways they could access data, the different data they may want, etc. This could become a very complicated user story that could be overwhelming to translate into actionable policy / systems design.

Instead - we try to atomize a user experience. In doing so we come up with simple user stories that tell us the "who what and why" - so that we can figure out "how"

Elements

The three most basic elements of a user story are:

Stakeholder - the type of stakeholder might be a user, curators, administrator, etc.
Feature - this could be a feature of a dataset, a system, or service
Goal - what is the stakeholder trying to achieve with the feature?

Templates

A template for a user story goes something like this:

As a user or stakeholder type I want some feature
So that some goal or value

As a data user of the RecyDepo
I want to find all relevant datasets for the Pacific Northwest
So that I can reliably compare recycling program policies, and outcomes for this region.

Some variations on a theme.

More recent work in human centered design places the goals first - that is, it attempts to say what is trying to be done, before even saying who is trying to do it...

This is helpful for thinking about goals that may be shared across different user or stakeholder types.

This variation of a user story goes something like:

In order to achieve some business value
As a stakeholder type
I want some new system feature

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FOR 04.27.2017

Create user stories for the following goals:

1. Searching for data about a subject.
2. Searching for data about a place.
3. Describe the way data were collected (as a data depositor)
4. Describe the author of a dataset (as a data depositor)

How might you satisfy these? What choices do these stories help clarify or obscure?