Salsa website stage 4 — ranking user stories

User stories

In the last workshop we drafted user stories for each persona, as well as Salsa user stories to capture our business requirements.

As a reminder, the user story format is:

As <persona>, I want to <goal related to website> so that <I receive benefit>.

For example: As Sarah, I want to find out more about Salsa so that I can validate my peer’s recommendation.

For more information, read our blog on stage 3— user stories.

Ranking user stories

We held a workshop to rank all the stories across desirability (high, medium or low), value for the business (high, medium or low), and feasibility in terms of the amount of work involved to implement (small, medium or large amount of work).

Our tools

Once again, we used Miro to rank the user stories. It meant we could all collaborate digitally, plus we already had the Miro board setup with the virtual post-it notes for each user story. With this as the base, we set up colour-coding for our ranking system, so each user story could be marked with the relevant labels. In the example below, the story was marked as high desirability for the user, high business value, and small effort to implement. The little black marker shows it was eventually flagged for release in MVP1.

Miro MVP1.png

Ranking Sarah’s user stories

We methodically went through and ranked all of Sarah’s user stories. Below are four examples to give you an idea of how the process went for us, with the Sarah persona.

• As Sarah, I want to subscribe to the Salsa newsletter so that I can continue to read information that’s useful to me. Medium (user), high (Salsa/business), small effort

• As Sarah, I want to learn more about Salsa’s vision so I can validate it aligns with my vision. High (user), high (Salsa/business), small effort

• As Sarah, I want to find out more about open data so that I can advocate for open data in my agency. High (user), high (Salsa/business), small effort

• As Sarah, I want to watch video content as my preferred medium so that I can qualify Salsa’s work and thought leadership quickly. Medium (user), medium (Salsa/business), medium effort

Ranking Brett’s user stories

We went through the same process with Brett’s user stories. Again, below are a few examples:

• As Brett, I want to look at the profiles of Salsa’s technical staff, so that I can see if they’ve got the skills necessary for my project. High (user), high (Salsa/business), small effort

• As Brett, I want to read technical blogs so that I can keep up with recent trends and find out how they might benefit me. Medium (user), high (Salsa/business), small effort

• As Brett, I want to find out about the technical suite that Salsa uses so that I can validate that it’s best practice. High (user), high (Salsa/business), small effort

• As Brett, I want to see Salsa has built large-scale and resilient enterprise platforms so that I can validate their expertise in this area. High (user), high (Salsa/business), small effort

Ranking Mary’s user stories

We went through the same process with Mary’s user stories. Again, below are a few examples:

• As Mary, I want to contact Salsa so that I can get a quote for my website development project. High (user), high (Salsa/business), small effort

• As Mary, I want to see a case study with metrics so that I can write (or to support) my business case. High (user), high (Salsa/business), medium effort

• As Mary, I want to read what other clients are saying about Salsa so that I can feel comfortable in choosing Salsa. High (user), high (Salsa/business), medium effort

Ranking Dilshan’s user stories

We went through the same process with Dilshan’s user stories. Again, below are a few examples:

• As Dilshan I want to look at the Salsa staff profiles so that I can get an idea of if I’d like to work with the people. High (user), high (Salsa/business), small effort

• As Dilshan, I want to see if there are more experienced staff within Salsa so that I can learn and grow. High (user), low (Salsa/business), small effort

• As Dilshan, I want to examine Salsa’s code contributions so that I can validate the quality of their coding skills. Medium (user), low (Salsa/business), small effort

Ranking Salsa’s user stories

Finally, we went through the same process with our own user stories. These were only ranked against business value and feasibility. Again, below are a few examples:

• As Salsa, we want to be able to have a good editing experience so we can put blog posts up easily. High (business/Salsa), small effort

• As Salsa, we want to have an article/blog search and browse facility so that users can find information. High (business/Salsa), medium effort

• As Salsa, we want to be able to easily integrate with other platforms (e.g. email marketing, CRM) so that we can benefit from them. Medium (business/Salsa), high effort

• As Salsa, we want to promote our vision so that more players will join the ‘open everything’ movement. High (business/Salsa), small effort

MVP

We then used the ranks to try to work out MVP. In our first pass, all stories that were ranked high desirability, high business value and a small amount of work to implement were automatically tagged for inclusion in MVP1. We then did another pass, reviewing other features that were ‘in between’ in some way (e.g. high business value, medium user desirability and small effort). However, we ran into some challenges...

Challenges

There was some subjectivity at this stage regarding what users would think of as high desirability, medium desirability and low desirability. We felt like we had to ‘guess’ and even had different opinions within the team for some items. It was clear that we needed to validate the desirability with actual users. With a major annual conference that we sponsor (DrupalSouth 2019) only days away, we realised it would be a great opportunity for testing. Especially given many of the attendees would be Salsa clients who, in many cases, map to our target personas. We decided we’d do a desirability card sort to test the desirability of our user stories.

Next steps

In addition to the user testing for desirability at DrupalSouth, the next workshop (information architecture) was also coming up.