UX Glossary · U
User story
Also: User stories
A short statement of a need in the form: as a role, I want something, so that some benefit.
A user story is a brief description of a requirement told from the user’s point of view. The common template, attributed to Rachel Davies and popularised by Mike Cohn, is:
As a [role], I want [capability], so that [benefit].
Stories came out of Extreme Programming in the late 1990s, and the original intent was explicit: a story is a placeholder for a conversation, not a specification.
The part that gets dropped
“So that”. The benefit clause is what makes a story reviewable, because it states the purpose, and a purpose can be met in more ways than the one the author had in mind.
Without it a story is just a feature request in costume. “As a user, I want a dropdown” tells the team nothing about what problem a dropdown was supposed to solve, so nobody can propose a better answer.
Where the format struggles
Non-functional requirements do not fit it well. “As a user, I want the page to load in under two seconds” is a performance budget wearing a story’s clothes, and pretending otherwise adds ceremony without clarity.
It also produces “as a user” as a role for everything, which is a sign that nobody has decided who the story is for.
In practice
Acceptance criteria carry the detail. The story holds the intent, the criteria hold the conditions, and the conversation between them is where the design decision actually happens.