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IntercomExplainer
Designing Features Using Job Stories - Inside Intercom
Summary
Personas rely on demographic attributes that fail to explain causality behind consumption, and User Stories couple implementation with motivations, obscuring reasons for feature failure. Job Stories overcome this by focusing on the situation, motivation, and desired outcome without prescribing a solution. A case study demonstrates the approach: designing a profile page for a car loan application, using a five-step process starting with the high-level job of helping salespeople secure loans. The team observed customers currently rely on physical proximity to assess trust, and wrote a Job Story about anxiety of sharing sensitive data electronically. The resulting UI featured the salesperson’s photo, title, cars sold, years at company, and contact options, each chosen to ease customer anxiety and ensure safe data sharing.
Context
Product teams historically relied on Personas and User Stories to define features, but these methods fail to capture the causality, anxieties, and motivations behind user behavior, leading to flawed product decisions. As development teams seek to be closer to customers, a better approach is needed.
Approach / What changed
The article outlines a five-step process for applying Job Stories: 1) start with the high-level job, 2) identify sub-jobs that support it, 3) observe how people currently solve the problem, 4) write Job Stories that investigate causality, anxieties, and motivations, and 5) create a solution that resolves the Job Story. This process was demonstrated by designing a profile page for a car loan product, where the Job Story focused on customer trust anxiety.
Takeaways
Personas fail because they use demographic attributes that do not explain why a user consumes a product in a given situation; Job Stories focus on context, anxiety, and motivation instead.
User Stories couple implementation with outcomes, making it hard to tell if a feature fails due to a wrong solution or a wrong assumption; Job Stories decouple these by describing the situation and desired outcome without prescribing implementation.
In a real-world example, a team used Job Stories to design a profile page with a photo, job title, and contact options, each element directly tied to the job of easing customer trust anxiety when entering sensitive financial data.
FAQ
What is the main problem with Personas?
Personas are imaginary customers defined by demographic attributes like age and hobbies that do not explain causality. They do not help the team understand why a customer consumes or does not consume a product, because they ignore context and motivations.
How do Job Stories differ from User Stories?
User Stories couple implementation with motivations and outcomes, making failure diagnosis difficult. Job Stories describe the situation, the user's motivation, and the desired outcome without specifying a solution, allowing teams to focus on causality, anxieties, and context.
How do you write a Job Story?
A Job Story captures when a situation occurs, what the user is motivated by, and what outcome they expect, without prescribing the implementation. For example: 'When car salespeople and customers interact via the product, customers want to feel they can trust the organization, so that clients feel safe entering their financial information.'
Source and freshness
- Source
- intercom.com
- Published
- Added to Yomu
Summaries are generated from the original by a language model. Check the original before relying on it.
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