Does Your App Need a User Story?
By: Scarlett Rose
Tags: Mobile App Design, User Stories, Mobile Marketing, Mobile Apps, Mobile App Development

In software development, a user story is a brief and simple explanation of a feature or functionality written from a user’s point of view.

Image by William Iven

Wondering whether your app needs a user story or not? Well, writing a user story helps your team know about the features and functionalities of the end-product. Here are some of the major benefits of creating a user story for your product.

In this article, I’ve talked about

What is a user story? Benefits of creating a user story How to write a user story for your mobile app?

Let’s begin!

What is a user story?

A user story is a simple description of the features and functionalities of your end-product. It describes the complete functionality of an application. The main goal of writing a user story for an app is to describe who the target audience is, what features they want, and how each functionality would work in the app.

A user story helps to capture each and every feature of an app from a user’s perspective. It helps to build a successful end-product for boosting your business growth.

While creating a user story for your app, it’s important that the terms specified in it should be understandable for everyone involved in the product development team — technical as well as non-technical members. A user story is a part of the agile development approach that helps in understanding the requirements of the users.

The success of an app depends on accurately understanding the users’ needs and then finally developing the final product that meets these requirements. Everyone in the app industry these days is inquisitive to know the reasons why your app needs a user story. In the upcoming section, I’ve covered the biggest reasons why you need a user story for your mobile app!

Benefits of creating a user story

Wondering why you should create a user story for your app? While building a good app helps to uplift your brand image, the benefits of creating a user story for making a successful app just can’t be ignored.

Creating an app’s user story may seem like extra work. So, why not skip this step and save time? But that isn’t the case.

Here are a few benefits of creating a user story for your mobile app.

Smooth collaboration

One of the biggest benefits of creating a user story is that a user story helps to enable smooth collaboration between you and your team.

It acts as a bridge that connects you with the development team. If you’ve set up a team of offshore developers, then it’s important they understand what you are actually looking for in the end product.

Thus, a user story helps the development team to get clarity in terms of design and technologies to be used for your project. Moreover, it allows you to review and track the progress of the project.

Focus on end-users

One of the major reasons why your app needs a user story is that a user story helps you to remain focused on the needs of the users during the entire app development process. It helps you to draw the attention of your development team towards who is the end-user, whom the app is being made for, and why they would need the app. The main aim of building the product is constantly in focus during the whole app development process.

Saves time

Time plays an important role in the development process. The more is the time taken to complete the project, the more are the expenses involved. One of the biggest reasons why your app needs a user story is that it helps to save your app development time.

As all the features of your app are specified in the user story, you need not invest extra time in explaining things to your development team. Thus, writing a user story helps to save time and enables quick delivery of the product. With a well-framed and effective user story written for your app, there would be no confusion in the minds of the developers regarding the app’s features and functionalities.

Facilitates better communication

User stories help establish two-way communication between you and the development team. You no longer need a detailed description of the documents to explain to your team what kind of product you want. A user story does it all. It enables both parties to share their feedback and responses.

How to write a user story for your mobile app?

After reading these benefits of creating a user story, let’s look at how to create a user story. Before I talk about how to write a user story, it’s important that you understand what an Epic is. It’s essential that you know the difference between a user story and an epic.

Both these concepts are interlinked and help in letting your team know about the features of your end-product. While a user story focuses on one requirement or request from a single user, an Epic is a collection of requirements from multiple users.

An Epic describes in detail each and every feature of the product. Simply put, it provides a high-level view of the main objective that combines multiple user stories. Writing a user story is simple, but the process of writing a user story involves both you and your development team.

Here are the three different phases of a user story:

Writing An Epic — An epic includes a brief description of all the features that your end product has and user requirements that it would fulfill. It aims to get your development team a clear picture of what you exactly want. Creating a User Story — Once you have created your Epics, it’s time to write your user story. This phase includes mutual discussions and team meetings to discuss in advance about the features and functionalities of the product that you’re planning to build. Implementation Phase — Once your user story is complete, you can start with the development of your product. As the development of your app advances, you may have to make slight changes and updates to your product. ‍‍So, it’s important that your development team is prepared to adapt to these changes in advance.

Creating a user story for your app — final words

A user story plays a crucial role in the smooth execution of an app development process. For making effective use of your user stories, ensure that all the features and functionalities that you’ve proposed in your app meet your users’ requirements.

At the end of the day, the main goal is to fulfill users’ requirements and needs. The main objective of writing a user story is to get a clear idea of the users’ needs and make a final product that fulfills these requirements.