Telling A User Story

Telling a great user story means building a heart connection between your customer and the team building your products.  Heart connection means building empathy.  Something that connects you with the emotion that the user is experiencing.  Helping the team understand the pain.  The team should feel the customer’s frustration or joy just a little bit.

You know you have a good user story when the developers keep talking about it.  When they come back the next day with different (usually better) ideas on how to solve the pain.

 

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“How to Write Human User Stories” Presentation

This presentation will tell you all there is to know about human user stories:

  • Tools you will need – customer feedback, customer interviews, personas.
  • Grouping customers into segments
  • What humans care about – performance, usability, and accessibility.
  • How to write user stories for virtual reality, augmented reality, and machine learning.

I would be excited to give part or all of this presentation to your team or organization.  Check out the PowerPoint Presentation and feel free to send any questions or requests to public@jayfisher.info

Leadership Track Speaker

I was fortunate to get to present at the Project Management Institute (PMI) South Dakota’s 2017 Professional Development symposium in the Leadership Track.  I got to talk about my favorite topic – how to understand customers.

Topic: How to Write Human User Stories

Jay Fisher, PMP is a Product Manager at MetaBank focused on creating software that builds relationships with cardholders.  Jay believes that the key to a successful project is creating user stories that connect the team to the customer.  After spending almost a decade working on new product development projects, Jay knows that building the heart connection requires focus and an agile responsiveness to surprises.  Jay has launched cardholder websites, mobile apps, and enterprise software in the consumer products and financial services industries.  He is a certified Project Management, New Product Development, and Pragmatic Marketing Professional. Jay holds a BS in Mathematics and Economics from the University of North Dakota.

“How to Write Human User Stories” is a practical conversation on how to connect teams to the needs of the end user.  We will discuss using customer visits and personas to discover user problems and to make user stories more relatable.

Understanding user’s expertise level and usage frequency vs the types of complaining customers to show how to target user stories for maximum impact.  We will show how focusing on a well-defined customer can increase team effectiveness and bring novel solutions to light.

PMI SD: Symposium 2017 Leadership Track

Eliminating My Wallet

I have been trying to minimize and eventually eliminate my wallet and keys for a couple of years.  I recently tried to scan all my membership cards into a mobile app.  It made my wallet very thin, but there was a problem.  Retail locations can not scan my phone and cashiers have to manual type my number every time, which completely negates any convenience from eliminating my wallet.

As a millennial trying to eliminate my wallet, I want POS systems to be able to scan my digitized membership cards, so the front line staff doesn’t have to manually enter my number.

-Verify the number is correct in the POS system
-Verify that the process can be completed in less than 2 seconds

OCR of License Plates in Drive Through

Background

The app is the Taco Bell mobile app; customers can earn rewards, get coupons, and order food for pickup.  After conducting customer interviews and a small survey (n=2), the biggest consumer problem is the need to get fast food into the customer’s mouth faster.  The existing pickup experience has too much friction; it requires the customer to tell us when he is on his way and to read a number to the cashier.

 

Feature Overview

The new feature would rely on license plate optical character recognition (OCR) scanners to notify the food preparation team to make the food when the customer pulls into the parking lot and to notify the cashier which car to hand the food to in the drive through.  Taco Bell and Dominos are the market leaders in using technology to improve their fast food deliver experience, but the same feature would improve any app to physical pickup experience.

 

Personas

Our target customer is “David Drive Through”.  He has a smart phone with a data plan that he uses continually.  David eats Taco Bell more than once per week.  He orders the same thing 60% of the time, but he is attracted to new items and specials.  David uses the drive through when he is on the way to work and he will not eat here if he thinks it will take too long.  If Dave comes with friends, they will come into the store so they can each pay separately (future feature idea).

 

User Stories

  1. As David placing my first online order, I want to enter my license plate number, so that I can get my food faster.

 

  1. As David placing my second order online, I just want to pick my food and hit the order button, so that the experience can be as transparent as possible.

-Verify that the customer can hit one button to repeat last order.

 

  1. As David after I receive my food, I want to receive an in app notification, so that I can know my credit card was charged.

-Verify that there is a feedback mechanism in the alert to block fraudulent purchases.

 

  1. As the food preparation team, I want David’s food added to my order que when he pulls into the parking lot, so we can have it hot and ready for him.

 

  1. As the cashier, I want to know when I should hold David’s food out the window, so he does not even have to stop.

 

  1. As the restaurant manager, I want to report against in app purchase in my location, so that I can manage my business.

 

Validation/Modeling

The expectation is that this feature will save time for the cashier, make the food preparation more effective, drive new customers into stores, and increase the frequency that existing customers visit the store.  We will measure or estimate each of these variables to justify the cost of two OCR scanners in each location and the development expense.  I propose we pilot this feature in the Sioux Falls market, where we can iteratively improve the feature before a nationwide launch.

ATM of the Future

As an ATM customer, I want to get cash without a card using biometric and out of channel verification, so that getting cash is the ultimate convenience.

As a paranoid debit card holder, I want cash withdraws to be blocked if I’m not within 5 feet of the ATM, so that I don’t have to worry about theft.

As fraud prevention specialist, I want potential fraudsters to be shocked before they can cause trouble, so that I have a perfect save record.

As the federal reserve, I want individual ATMs to print money, so I don’t have to reign in quantitative easing.