I really like the James Buckhouse explains in is article Story Map:
Halfway between a storyboard and a treasure map, it bundles the value and functional flow of your product with the delight people might feel at each step in your product. It sketches the UX flow without locking it down, and it delivers the gist of an idea and the emotional gestalt without prematurely belaboring the details.
A story map depicts how your product works and why it matters—but crucially—it does not explicitly spell out the final design, UI or in-the-weeds UX logic. It does, however, hold the product vision and works as a rubric against which the team can make better and faster decisions.
The article has some great examples worth looking at. As a big customer journey mapping fan, this is definitely something I want to try out.
I have one quibble though, and that’s with the name… “Story mapping” is already a very well established process in Agile development. Here are just a few articles about it:
- The new user story backlog is a map
- Visualizing Progress with Agile Storymapping
- Winnipeg Agilist: How to create a User Story Map
Semantics are important, so my suggestion would be to simply use a synonym:
@buckhouse Maybe just use a synonym and go with “narrative mapping”?
— Rian van der Merwe (@RianVDM) August 2, 2014