6 Unique Story Mapping Advantages

Story mapping is the process of analyzing user stories and their experience with a product/service in order to improve their overall satisfaction. It is a visual tool that helps highlight specific stages, emotions, and outcomes of a user’s journey. Being able to isolate these stages and understand how an experience can improve is a very valuable exercise for businesses. In this article, we will highlight six-story mapping advantages that demonstrate the benefit they have on businesses.

Story Mapping Advantages

Like other useful templates, story maps have their fair share of advantages and what they offer to the market. Due to its robust analysis, it enables the owners of brands to know what needs to be improved and what needs their focus to bring change to their products. This article is all about the various story mapping advantages. These benefits are listed down below.

1. Customer Driven

The story map is all about customers’ journeys, experiences, and activities that led to the customer’s and the product’s interaction. Story mapping does not focus on any other element except the customer and integrates accurate data of what customers feel about the product.

Other templates elaborate on both the necessary and unnecessary parts of the customer journey, and others (like the service blueprint) even dive into the internal operations behind a business. One of the best story mapping advantages is that it focuses only on the customer-driven actions and how these can improve from their perspective.

2. Creates Shared Understanding

When you build a story map for your product, everyone in your team can collaborate to spot what’s missing and locate what needs to be done. Story maps are a great way to build a collective understanding of a problem. Thanks to their accuracy, they successfully provide a shared understanding to everyone involved with a project.

Keeping everyone on the same page is effective, especially in projects where you need to have your team on the same page rather than having multiple opinions that can harm further steps involved in the launching of your products.

3. Offers a Holistic View of The Customer’s Experience

Some templates provide extensive detail about anything and everything related to a customer’s journey, but this is not the case with user maps. User maps are known for their holistic yet precise approach to a problem or issue. They provide the right amount of scope to view user stories and leave out details that don’t directly impact the customer’s journey.

Creating a clear and narrow focus on a customer’s experience and viewing their journey from the top-down without losing perspective is one of the more helpful story mapping advantages.

4. Improves External Communication

All brands want to communicate and interact with their customers to build a good reputation. User maps allow businesses to reach their customers with accurate assumptions about their experience. This creates a more trusting relationship and enables more positive communication between a company and its customers.

5. Product Visualization

Story mapping provides an excellent alternative to linear project approaches and allows teams to create a visual representation of their customer’s journey. Visualizing each phase and how they connect to a larger product vision is helpful for teams trying to orient the goals and motivations of the customer.

Story maps effectively visualize each step of any process and what is happening to the product in different activities. This enables the team to have a perfect product visualization, and they can easily spot steps that need improvements.

6. Shows Important Requirements First

Story maps elaborate on the necessary requirements that the project team needs to prioritize. By doing this, multiple teams can start their improvement process based on the priorities listed on the story map.

Being able to locate different pitfalls and prioritize the next steps based on the most urgent customer needs to be addressed is very helpful for teams.

Learn more: What is Story Mapping?

Conclusion

These story mapping advantages mainly show how helpful it is to visualize, prioritize, and communicate the stages in a customer’s journey. If you want to learn more about story mapping, make sure you stay tuned to IdeaScale Whiteboard.