As a User...

January 19, 2021 10:56 AM

“As a user of Instagram I want to have all the growth features at my fingertips in the tab bar so that I can help the growth PM hit KPIs.” More shit user stories at @shituserstories.
posted by adrianhon (65 comments total)

All user stories are Agile. Agile is shit.

Therefore...
posted by Cardinal Fang at 10:58 AM on January 19, 2021 [15 favorites]

I'm going to say that these are all fine user stories (epics really) because they are talking about development actions that were actually implemented to annoy, grift, and trick users of the system the story was written for.

Can't blame the framework for shady business practices.
posted by The_Vegetables at 11:20 AM on January 19, 2021 [3 favorites]

As a user of the Technics KN keyboard
I want the latest edition of the keyboard
So that my fills will kick ass
And my songs will kick some serious whoop ass

USER STORY
USER STORY
USER STORY
USER STORY

Rock on Chicago
Rock over London
Google - Don't be evil!
posted by Cardinal Fang at 11:23 AM on January 19, 2021 [27 favorites]

Some of these could be called “honest user stories.”
posted by atoxyl at 11:23 AM on January 19, 2021 [5 favorites]

I mean, obviously they all are, but some retain a little bit of “this is what we’re pretending the user wants” and others don’t bother.
posted by atoxyl at 11:26 AM on January 19, 2021

Oh my I just independently found this through one of the excellent ladybug coders on Twitter and it is glorious. Great post!
posted by lazaruslong at 11:30 AM on January 19, 2021

This one actually does happen. I've been in email marketing for non-profit orgs for about four years, and we do get people contacting us now and then about having unsubscribed by mistake.
posted by SansPoint at 11:40 AM on January 19, 2021 [1 favorite]

Supplementary wiki page: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_pattern
posted by snerson at 11:42 AM on January 19, 2021 [4 favorites]

As a...
* Member of Metafilter

I want to...
* Make a good joke about this

So that...
* I can win the admiration of Mefi peeps

And also...
* Just hoping everyone is doing as ok as can reasonably be expected
posted by treepour at 11:49 AM on January 19, 2021 [81 favorites]

I was hoping these would be real, because at some point, someone literally did write these requirements.
posted by jacquilynne at 11:58 AM on January 19, 2021 [4 favorites]

As a...
*LinkedIn user

I want to...
*provide my expertise

So that...
*I can help them improve their product
posted by clawsoon at 12:39 PM on January 19, 2021 [1 favorite]

This is delightful, and man we fight this battle a lot. I recently built a design thinking template with a little asterisk saying "The person you're empathizing with is never the bank."
posted by chesty_a_arthur at 12:43 PM on January 19, 2021 [3 favorites]

As a . . .
user of your app

I want to . . .
be periodically asked "how do you like our app?"

So that . . .
I can stop using the app to do the things I thought I wanted to do and work on improving the app's ratings on the app store.
posted by skewed at 12:44 PM on January 19, 2021 [61 favorites]

This is timely; we're doing our product planning for the next quarter and have some new product managers who do not understand that writing a user story !== prepending the phrase "As a user, I would like to" onto a functional requirement.
posted by ook at 12:46 PM on January 19, 2021 [22 favorites]

As a...
* Me, your director

I want to...
* Have the damn KPIs on time, clearly laid out

So that...
* Why are you still looking at me?
posted by Cris E at 12:55 PM on January 19, 2021 [7 favorites]

So that...
* Why are you still looking at me?

OTOH, I supervise a number of junior SDEs and I tell them to never do anything where they don't understand the "why" or "so that."

I have worked in a lot of sleepwalking orgs where dumb / unjustified requirements are never challenged, just mindlessly executed. You have to innoculate software developers against that; we're the last line of defense against huge wastes of time and money.
posted by Sauce Trough at 1:00 PM on January 19, 2021 [9 favorites]

→ writing a user story !== prepending the phrase "As a user, I would like to"

Is this the UX version of “sudo make me a sandwich”?
posted by scruss at 1:01 PM on January 19, 2021 [12 favorites]

Also, can I say I love my job writing backend systems for a manufacturing company? because my users *are* my customers.

Contrast this with my job at the free-to-use people website where at critical times we would greenlight ads that looked like our interface, but were not our interface, to juice our clickthru rate.

Will never forget the day the VP of Sales climbed up my ass when she saw I was using an ad blocker at work.
posted by Sauce Trough at 1:12 PM on January 19, 2021 [4 favorites]

*As as user...
this Is Just To Say

I deleted
the emails
that were in
the inbox

*And which...
you were probably
collecting
for marketing purposes

*So that you can...
Forgive me
they were del.icio.us
easily hacked
and sold
posted by chavenet at 1:25 PM on January 19, 2021 [35 favorites]

* as someone who profits,
* I would like to simply undisplay deleted objects, and not truly delete them
* so that "delete" does not mean "opt out"
posted by Sauce Trough at 1:37 PM on January 19, 2021 [3 favorites]

As an
*academic developing an online course,
I want to
*be saved from pompous mangementspeak more appropriate to software developers than course developers, especially any coming from a self-promoting Agile-trained "expert"
so that I can
*get back to teaching vector calculus.

(No, I didn't know what a "user story" was when some random wannabemanager from the software world decided to try to force us academics to use them; we weren't given any discussion about what they were or why they might be useful, we were just told to use them. Note I had already included all of the same information in a much-easier-to-absorb format that I was already familiar with. Next time, not that there will be a next time, I'm telling said management drone that I will only process his request if he submits it in the form of a differential equation.)
posted by nat at 1:49 PM on January 19, 2021 [7 favorites]

Is this the UX version of “sudo make me a sandwich”?

It's kinda how like the kids in the 11th grade Honors English class at your school started saying "disingenuous" like 10 times a minute immediately after having the world explained to them for some quiz.
posted by sideshow at 1:50 PM on January 19, 2021 [1 favorite]

As a
* man

Of
* constant sorrow

I’ve seen
* trouble all my days
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 1:53 PM on January 19, 2021 [46 favorites]

That said, it does force Product/Project Managers to at least justify their feature requests with something that might benefit the customers, rather than them coming up with random shit that sounds cool for the engineers to implement
posted by sideshow at 1:53 PM on January 19, 2021

As a
* user of websites

I want to
* be provided with flashing grey circles and boxes roughly shaped like a website, while it is loading

so that
* when the website fails to load I can entertain myself with a crude approximation of its contents
posted by oulipian at 1:57 PM on January 19, 2021 [16 favorites]

OH MY GOD, is this what my brother-in-law, an Agile consultant whose job I don't understand, does all day????
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 2:39 PM on January 19, 2021 [10 favorites]

OH MY GOD, is this what my brother-in-law, an Agile consultant whose job I don't understand, does all day????

Well, not necessarily. Agile project management and User Stories™ are two distinct concepts, although management that drinks the Flavor-aide on one is very likely to go all in on the other at the same time.

Because, in my experience, when need to make a change to your software business, you might as well just start changing absolutely everything, all at once, and as hard and as fast as possible.
posted by sideshow at 2:46 PM on January 19, 2021 [4 favorites]

I would hope most organizations are too embarrassed to actually write these things down. I know my organization is.
posted by 3j0hn at 2:47 PM on January 19, 2021 [1 favorite]

As a
* user of websites

I want to
* be told that I shouldn't use the website and then given a link to an app store

so that
* I go install an app which circumvents all the privacy protections of the browser
posted by benzenedream at 2:50 PM on January 19, 2021 [32 favorites]

OH MY GOD, is this what my brother-in-law, an Agile consultant whose job I don't understand, does all day????

Probably falls under what traditionally strategic consultants would call change management. I'm guessing 90% of his day is fighting politics in organizations. Like how a feature gets implemented in non-software companies can be really scary political nightmares.

As a life long software consultant who probably should just be writing software, I spend most my time hand holding clients in how something will happen. It usually involves a lot of status reports about status reports (not joking).
posted by geoff. at 2:50 PM on January 19, 2021 [1 favorite]

Much like developing buyer personas in marketing and market research, for use in targeting company messaging, marketing channels, and product features at key market segments; which also requires understanding needs, use cases, etc., but the required constructs and research go far beyond these little UX scenarios.
posted by lathrop at 2:58 PM on January 19, 2021 [2 favorites]

I should add that user stories and agile methodology are really good at establishing frameworks for getting non-software people to say what they want. When I'm working with people who write software I just plainly say the feature and break it down naturally if something seems really complicated. So this is a really salty take but you'd be amazed at how hard it is to get non-software people to focus on asking exactly it is what they want. If there's a better way to do it without teaching them how to actually code I'd be all for it.

There's a certain theater for management so if things don't get done they can point to not having a user story or whatever but my take on that is that if you want to nitpick why something went wrong it usually isn't as simple as "no user stories."
posted by geoff. at 2:59 PM on January 19, 2021 [5 favorites]

As a...
* user of Metafilter,

I want to...
* have a fascinating plate of beans set in front of me

So that...
* I can be chastised for thinking about those beans too much.
posted by straight at 3:02 PM on January 19, 2021 [12 favorites]

Agile project management and User Stories™ are two distinct concepts

user stories are definitely strongly characteristic of certain flavors of agile though

(the joke here is not actually directly at the expense of either, on a methodological level anyway)
posted by atoxyl at 3:05 PM on January 19, 2021

I feel like people are maybe missing the point here? This account isn't criticising user stories (or the Agile process, or any of that) as a thing in and of itself - almost the exact opposite, in fact: it's satirising the current trend for extremely user-hostile experiences in software via the lens of a tool that is very explicitly supposed to focus developers on building better user experiences.

Once you frame your extremely user-hostile (but business-friendly) feature in terms of a user story, it becomes inherently absurd, and maybe you should be paying attention to that?
posted by parm at 3:05 PM on January 19, 2021 [56 favorites]

As a
* user of websites
I want to
* be told that I shouldn't use the website and then given a link to an app store

What I wouldn't give for a mobile browser that can retrieve the mobile version of a website but tell the server I'm on a desktop.
posted by straight at 3:09 PM on January 19, 2021 [12 favorites]

OTOH, Instagram is not a photo sharing site; it is a photo-sharing-site-themed casino, with all the manipulative UX dark patterns that that implies.
posted by acb at 3:23 PM on January 19, 2021 [2 favorites]

Parm gets it.

If I let my sales team write user stories, this is what I'd get.
posted by elwoodwiles at 3:26 PM on January 19, 2021 [12 favorites]

What I wouldn't give for a mobile browser that can retrieve the mobile version of a website but tell the server I'm on a desktop.

Safari already will do this for you (Click the "aA" button in the URL bar, then click "Request Desktop Website"). The problem is that websites either actively try to prevent this from working, or they check for mobile users using non-standard tricks instead of using the official way (User-Agent header).
posted by sideshow at 3:41 PM on January 19, 2021

In my shop devs write all the user stories. no matter who it affects. You can imagine it makes life a bit hard to try to figure out the 'why' when the client has no input at all.
posted by 922257033c4a0f3cecdbd819a46d626999d1af4a at 3:47 PM on January 19, 2021 [4 favorites]

Once you frame your extremely user-hostile (but business-friendly) feature in terms of a user story, it becomes inherently absurd, and maybe you should be paying attention to that?

Works for other things too.

As a...
* worker at your company

I want to...
* never get a pay rise

So that...
* the CEO can get a record bonus
posted by Absolutely No You-Know-What at 4:01 PM on January 19, 2021 [11 favorites]

As a...
Poster to Metafilter

I want to...
Be immediately subjected to harsh criticism

So that...
I never want to post anything here ever again.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 4:18 PM on January 19, 2021 [28 favorites]

One of the key components of XP? or Scrum? or something is "customer delight". It would be hard to explain how the Amazon story would end in anyone being "delighted".
posted by fiercekitten at 5:12 PM on January 19, 2021

One of the key components of XP? or Scrum? or something is "customer delight". It would be hard to explain how the Amazon story would end in anyone being "delighted".

Really? I mean, I can, right now, go to amazon, and find almost anything in the world that I could buy at a store, for cheaper than at that store, and then with a single button click, have that item in my hands in 24-48 hours. That is a goddamned miracle, to say nothing of delightful.

Now, does that all come with a price? Sure. And we should definitely keep that in mind, and talk about it, and work to change it. But that doesn't change the fact that the core interaction that Amazon has with customers is kind of fucking amazing.
posted by nushustu at 5:19 PM on January 19, 2021 [4 favorites]

OH MY GOD, is this what my brother-in-law, an Agile consultant whose job I don't understand, does all day????

Not necessarily. It's part of the grim ritual, but he's almost certainly splitting time between:

• Teaching managers how to reduce complex tasks into smaller parts, ideally each one so totally abstract and inscrutable that it makes the developer working it wonder what the hell they're turning these small workblocks into
• Rehearsing his pronunciation of "waterfall" so that he says it with the kind of angry disgust usually reserved for people who you watched bayonet your family
• Extolling the virtues of team velocity as a trust-builder with the business, while pointedly ignoring the fact that if you have 10 teams and 9 of them average 50 points per sprint and one averages 70 points a sprint, the de facto team requirement will be 70.
• Insisting that story points are in no way similar to the Franklin Mint Commemorative Coins that grandma buys off of QVC
• Invoking the Words of Power that extend the lifetime of the Jira instance kept in a phylactery in the server room by another 24 hours
• Repeating "this story is 3 POINTS, not 3 DAYS. We deal with time estimates in ABSTRACTIONS" with ever-increasing ferocity
• Winking and nodding when the managers decide to ditch the points and just use days

posted by Mayor West at 5:32 PM on January 19, 2021 [35 favorites]

As someone who
often buys things
I want to
get an email or a mailing from every company I buy stuff from
asking me to complete a survey about my recent purchase
so I can waste 30 mins or more
giving them more of my PII than is necessary.
posted by hrpomrx at 5:33 PM on January 19, 2021 [8 favorites]

while pointedly ignoring the fact that if you have 10 teams and 9 of them average 50 points per sprint and one averages 70 points a sprint, the de facto team requirement will be 70.

This. Is. So. True.

Repeating "this story is 3 POINTS, not 3 DAYS. We deal with time estimates in ABSTRACTIONS" with ever-increasing ferocity

I just ran into this one last week.
posted by 922257033c4a0f3cecdbd819a46d626999d1af4a at 6:15 PM on January 19, 2021 [1 favorite]

Mayor West: I feel God in this Chili's tonight.
posted by snerson at 6:38 PM on January 19, 2021 [1 favorite]

In any industry the highest performing team is the standard.
posted by geoff. at 6:57 PM on January 19, 2021 [1 favorite]

As a...
Cow

Wen its...
Nite

I want to...
Lik the bred
posted by Two unicycles and some duct tape at 7:19 PM on January 19, 2021 [24 favorites]

But, Previn. We work in silence.
posted by StarkRoads at 8:05 PM on January 19, 2021 [2 favorites]

Mayor West, I can't really put into letters the sound I just made, but may I say I feel seen.

(Also Jesus Christ, so that's where my boss got the whole 'delight our customers thing'! My work mostly involves dealing with sewer pipes more intelligently. No one is delighted by our product; it is not a thing that is possible. Why is simply solving a problem no longer enough.)
posted by kalimac at 9:20 PM on January 19, 2021

it's satirising the current trend for extremely user-hostile experiences in software via the lens of a tool that is very explicitly supposed to focus developers on building better user experiences.

If a service is free, you are not the customer, or the user.
posted by Reyturner at 9:54 PM on January 19, 2021

As a...
*new app user

I want to...
*have the opportunity to be tricked into installing other apps I don't want

So that...
*I can have more spyware running on my computer collecting even more of my data

(Did I do that right?)
posted by blue shadows at 10:17 PM on January 19, 2021 [3 favorites]

As the...
Narcissistic president of the United States on Twitter

I want to...
be given special rules to me and only me in the guise of free speech, aided by a CEO who is almost as self-regarding as I am

So that I can...
post threats to violence, reach my white supremicist racist supporters, and attempt to provoke civil war because I'm butthurt that more people liked Biden and I can't accept losing
posted by humuhumu at 1:22 AM on January 20, 2021 [1 favorite]

The website doesn’t load fast enough!

Possible solutions:
1. Figure out how to lighten the page so it loads faster - do we really need to load 164 different frameworks for this? Is it worth ticking off all of our users just for that one feature?
2. Add YET ANOTHER FRAMEWORK to show a fake skeleton of the page as it struggles to load

Option 2, that’s the ticket
posted by caution live frogs at 4:38 AM on January 20, 2021 [6 favorites]

As a:

*software developer

I want to:

*get rid of this stupid user story format and just have users tell me what their requirements are like normal people

So that I can:

*get on with my job instead of having yet another fucking layer of flavor-of-the-decade Agile cargo-cult hoops to jump through
posted by Mr. Bad Example at 5:16 AM on January 20, 2021 [8 favorites]

Ah, users. I'm luckily well shielded from my end users by several levels of management at my company that communicate with the procurement organization of the customer that's run by some washed-up desk jockey, not the poor sod that eventually will use my equipment in the field...
posted by Harald74 at 5:44 AM on January 20, 2021 [1 favorite]

That being said, I've found that user stories are actually a pretty good tool to force us developers to actually try to agree with the customer on something. Like most tools it's pretty open to abuse, sure.
posted by Harald74 at 5:46 AM on January 20, 2021 [2 favorites]

In all my years working in and around software, the best projects have been ones where Agile is being used properly (ie: on SaaS projects with a stable CI process with clear long and short term goals from management with room for the engineers to implement the technology they thought best) and in good faith. But I've never worked on a bad project where is language and ceremonies of Agile weren't being used.
posted by Reyturner at 8:56 AM on January 20, 2021

I've worked in all kinds of projects using all kinds of methodologies. Agile can work really well if it is used with discipline and good intentions, but in my experience that is rare, Agile is often used as a cover for bad practices. A cover your ass kind of thing, just blindly follow the ceremonies, and if it all goes to shit, not my fault, I followed the procedures.

The two things I have found work better than following any specific methodology is to create a culture were UX, QA, Technical Writing, etc... are all first class citizens along with developers and managers, and to make "think of the user" the number 1 principle. If you can get a team to switch from the mindset of "the users are idiots, how do we make them do what we want them to do" (users are idiots is a very common mindset, do they teach this in programming school?) to "users know what they want, how do we make it easier for them to get there" you are golden. And when you have this kind of culture, something like good user stories organically starts happening.

Related to this post, I did have a project manager with direct line to a VP that turned a great product for the users into a money printing machine that the users hate. Paraphrasing one of their
"user stories": As a low engagement user I want to be motivated to create an account and provide personal information so that I can become a high engagement user.
posted by Dr. Curare at 10:21 AM on January 20, 2021 [6 favorites]

Agile is often used as a cover for bad practices. A cover your ass kind of thing, just blindly follow the ceremonies, and if it all goes to shit, not my fault, I followed the procedures.

I mean isn't this true of a lot of things? I've certainly fought back against bad practices of being agile for the sake of it. Quibi could have been as agile as possible and still failed.
posted by geoff. at 1:13 PM on January 20, 2021

User stories I find valuable when they're actually surprising to read -- oh, is *that* why people would do X, they're actually leading into doing Y. Without that, they're just a last line of defense against people demanding things that look more-obviously-ridiculous when phrased in the form of a user story (which I take to be the point of this Twitter account).

But that line of defense fits into what @Dr. Curare said, that if devs and product managers didn't lord it over UX and tech writing they might learn a lot. Good tech writers can tell you an incredible amount about what's awkward about your product, because that's exactly where they've been working to spackle over your bullshit.
posted by away for regrooving at 11:25 PM on January 20, 2021 [1 favorite]

to "users know what they want, how do we make it easier for them to get there" you are golden. And when you have this kind of culture, something like good user stories organically starts happening.


Maybe, but most software don't have one user with one goal, it has many users with many goals. The app I work on has about 17 different business owners, all suggesting products, and supports more than 30 product streams, all with different users (one technical set covers like 2/3 of the earth's population) and some with a handful of users in-house we can talk to. The product that supports that many people -do you think my development group alone is the going to be the decider for everything? No, we are not, so we have to make due the best we can.
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:43 AM on January 22, 2021

Actual marketing story script for articulating a strategy:

Our goal is to grow ...
(growth metric)
for ...
(target customer)
by creating more value for ...
(role, business type, persona)
who are seeking ...
(product, description)
when they are ...
(occasion, situation, action)
because they need to ...
(goal, reason for use/need)
We provide this product with ...
(value proposition, attributes)
better than ...
(competitors)
We do this by ...
(various features, positioning).
posted by lathrop at 4:35 PM on January 23, 2021 [1 favorite]