Story Mapping is an exciting visual exercise to create and define user interactions with any product or item. It is necessary for both product managers and developers to craft an accurate story map, representing each step and how a client’s journey will be affected positively or negatively. These points are all important to weigh when creating a story map, but there are other factors that make story mapping unique. In this article, we will outline some of the features that make story mapping unique and will detail why they are important.
Factors Making Story Mapping Unique
The market is filled with multiple use cases of story maps and their advantages, but we have picked some elements that make story mapping unique.
Helps Generate PR
It is a priority for many companies to portray themselves positively, and PR is an efficient way to do so. Story mapping helps organizations convey their stance effectively to the general audience and ensures people that they are improving their experience. It also helps them introduce their products effectively to new circles and generate fruitful partnerships. While story maps are mainly an internal tool, they can be edited slightly to display important customer-facing information and can be a resource to help generate PR.
Visualize All Project Activities
You can utilize a story map to help elaborate your activities and projects comprehensively to your audience. This will enable you to showcase the progress your company has made since you last updated your customers and will increase their level of engagement with your material. It will pick every detail and enhance it for the observer to see where your business was and where you are going.
Focus on What Matters
As mentioned above, it is a great tool to elaborate your business, its activities, and aims in a format that people will not only like but also connect with. However, story maps have a unique way of letting you know what you should focus on, which areas are screaming for your attention.
It does so by organizing each detail in a series to make you understand where you should focus next. This ultimately has the positive effect of giving more value to users who deserve your focus.
Value Team Opinions & Consensus
When creating a new product, the last thing you want to see is misalignment within your team and a sense of division around the right thing to do. Story maps create a level of stability and consensus by allowing people to share their understandings related to the project. This improves customer experience, team unity, and the overall quality of the product in the market.
Prioritize User Value to the Max
Your users have value, and when you make them your priority, your product will experience new heights. Story maps create a vision of what users want, what their perspectives are related to a certain brand, and how they are experiencing the product overall. This leads product managers and developing teams to choose the best options to manage user value and product quality.
Effective Project Elaboration
Nobody wants to forget the nitty-gritty details of their project and what makes it stand out from others in the market. A story map makes the presentation of the project incredibly compelling for others and can include minor details about a customer’s experience. You also don’t have to deal with the hassle you usually face with your go-to presentations. Instead, you can export slides and use them on the map to make them look more vibrant and project-centric.
An Amazing Tool for Annual Reports & Market Events
Everyone is familiar with the boring annual reports and their tiring deliveries. But story maps make it convincingly unique by adding multiple media options and precise details to explain your point more effectively. This allows you to create engaging annual reports that dive into the specific detailed changes of a customer journey without having to bore everyone in the audience.
Conclusion
There are many reasons to use a story map to display your customer’s journey, but besides these advantages, there are also many things that make story mapping unique. Hopefully, this guide helped highlight some of those unique applications, and if you want to learn how to build a story map yourself, check out our other posts on Fresco.
