Who writes the user stories, acceptance criteria, story details? And when does the UX design comes in this process?

Process & Techniques
#1

Hi,

I am leading a team of developers that work remotely. I am currently writing user stories with a long list of requirements and adding high-fi mock ups for almost all instances of each child story. As you might imagine, this is a lengthy process that is not very efficient. As we improve the software every month, the list of stories, their requirements, and their mock ups are outdated on each month release and even weekly when we have revision from the company owner.

I would like to know from your experience in the team, which role writes the user stories and who writes the acceptance criteria, and where in this process comes the UX design? And especially for incremental software updates.

If you have any ideas on how to improve this process to better use our time, that would be awesome too. Thanks

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#2

hi @diana_aguilar_ra
you asked a million dollar question. I believe that if you will be able to define a standard for it, you will be rich, very rich.

I can tell you about my experience as a UX Designer working with several teams on several products in an Agile environment.
I am very happy (and lucky) to work with a company that pushes the design culture for all the web projects (we have also desktop apps).

  • As UX designer I am involved in defining the product(s) roadmap with product managers, product owners and sale people
  • Once the roadmap is decided (we do a review twice per year) the projects are assigned to the teams (for us squads)
  • The project owner will define the priority together with UX designers, business analysts and IT team leaders (Back-end, front-end, IT architects etc)
    *We have several iterations to understand the context and to analyse the technology stack we will use to ship the product
    *The business analyst writes the first draft of the user stories
    *The UX people receive the draft and we start to implement the design process (card-sorting, lo-fi wireframes etc)
    *As soon as possible we do qualitative tests with our customers to check how we are progressing
    *The user stories are updated according to the findings we will collect in the different iterations

I hope it will help u

3 Likes
#3

I have been seeing more jobs for UX Writers… in my dream job (haven’t found a UX job yet), I’d be the one doing all those user stories, and writing not just for the app or site, but also internal documentation, empathy maps, persona, journey’s, presentations, etc. It seems to me that a lot of UX jobs want a UX designer with good storytelling chops, but perhaps they should be adding to their team a great storyteller with good UX chops?

2 Likes
#4

Agreed – I’m seeing LOTS of articles etc about UX writing and when I tweet them they come in as most popular for the week, consistently.

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#5

Now if only I could grab one of those jobs! LOL

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#6

I am glad you asked this question. In my current corporate organization, visual design is celebrated heavily but UX is still in its infancy, and while everyone feels there is a need for it, there aren’t really any processes defined as of yet. I was brought on as a Product Designer and I actively participate in setting up the roadmap for the product, even involving myself in the user research, experience mapping and the strategy phase, all the while collaborating with my Product Managers. I do enjoy the process but sometimes I get this pushback from my managers claiming that this might be a Product Manager’s job, and I should perhaps spend more time on the actual designs (or wireframes). It would be interesting to hear others’ thoughts on it.

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#7

IMO if you are talking RAD or even Agile, its the Business Analyst working with the Systems Analyst to define use case and to document it so it can then be developed and tested whilst being kept locked down. That is speaking from a traditional development perspective. Cant be bothered trying to cover every methododology base.

But the BAs of course, the same people who perform the UX Analysis and Design, because we know big corp doesnt wanna pay for 6 roles when 1 person can do the lot for the same price. Reality.