Organize Stories

Before you begin, to learn all about what a story is, click here.

Whereas insights are the raw details, stories form the larger picture of how your customer uses your product and how you can best improve it for them. Stories help you organize your insights in a way that best benefits your product decision-making.

Assign Insights to a Story

When adding an insight from anywhere, the submission form asks you to assign the insight to an existing or new story. Thus, when submitted, it will appear under the chosen story in the admin portal.

Once stories are created, they are visible in the Stories page of the admin portal. You can view all previously submitted stories at a glance to give you a good overview of what feature requests are popular and important.

Organize Stories

In UserVitals, we help you organize your stories by status, type, visibility, category, and labels.

1. Status: The status of your story indicates what stage of the feedback loop it's in. The stages include: Open, Under Review, Planned, In Progress, Completed, and Closed. This is useful for your team to see when analyzing all the stories. Also, when a story is labelled as "Planned", "In Progress", or "Completed", it will appear in your product roadmap.
2. Type: UserVitals has four story types available for your team to choose from. These include: Idea, Issue, Praise, or Other. Seeing the "type" associated with a story is a quick way to better understand what a story is about and its importance (e.g. "issues" would oftentimes take priority over taking action on "ideas" or "praises").
3. Visibility: You can change the visibility of specific stories between "Public" and "Hidden". When public, viewers of your customer portal can see the story item on the roadmap if it's in the "Planned", "In Progress", or "Completed" stages. When hidden, only admins on your team can see these stories. However, some other changes made in the admin portal may override the visibility selected here. Learn more about visibility.
4. Category:  Categories are used to organize stories into broader groups related to your product. These will be displayed publicly on the roadmap when a user clicks on a roadmap item. Some examples of potential categories include: Web App, Mobile App, Integrations, API, etc.
5. Labels: Labels are used to help your team understand the insights submitted under that story and the type of work needed to accomplish the story's product change. These labels are visible only to your internal team via the admin portal. Some examples of potential labels include: Quick Fix. Large Project, Improvement, UI/UX, etc.

Share, Merge, and Delete

In the Stories page, you will also see a More button on the right side. Clicking that button allows you to share, merge, and delete the story.

1. Share: If you would like to share a story with a coworker or collect feedback from your customers, click the "Share" button to create a link for the selected story.
2. Merge: Click the "Merge" button to easily merge user stories if you discover that they are too similar and in fact really just one larger use case. This feature will help keep your stories even more organized and save time!
3. Delete: Keep your workspace tidy by deleting any stories that you made accidently or don't need anymore.

For each story, you can add a description and portal summary either when creating the story, or by clicking on an existing story and editing it there.

A story description is only viewable by your team, unlike the portal summary. The private description is a good place to put technical details, UI/UX design details, specific features to work on first as a priority based on user feedback.

A portal summary will be publicly visible to your customers on the roadmap on the customer portal. Make sure to keep this fairly high level so your users can understand easily the purpose of this feature, understand its benefits, and why it might be useful for them.

This is a good place to also entice users to leave specific feedback. For example: “We would love to hear your feedback about this feature, especially about X and Y use case. Or if your team is doing Z. Let us know your use case below”. That way your team can collect insights from your customers.