Learning with stories in mobile app design
By the time I joined the mobile team, Prezi already tried to launch its Android app and failed due to a mix of reasons, part product, and part technology. Talking with several people, we had the idea of using stories to define the product that would focus the efforts. To make this happen, I had to collect stories from user research that we could refine and build upon. I also had to make sure the stories collected would affect the whole product development and validation of the MVP we had in mind for the app.
We already had weekly user sessions (interviews and tests), so the first task was to rework our guides. The interviews became focused on stories about the user’s experiences and contexts, while the tests became explicit validators for the stories we collected. The collected data improved our initial understanding of the product and helped evolve our idea of the product definition. This also helped define our acceptance criteria for MVP validation. The understanding also helped in focusing the design efforts.
Thinking in stories helped us learn and understand much better user behavior and specifics of needs. It also focused on the efforts of everybody: developers, pm, designers, and stakeholders. We could also show the stories we used for product marketing that finally contributed to the successful launch of the app. This experience made me fall in love with stories, it’s such a powerful but little-known tool for UX people. I also did a conference talk on this topic.