When someone shows me a diagram, it often feels quite abstract to me: it often doesn't do a better job of communicating the idea to me than a few paragraphs of well-written text - but many of my friends would say the opposite.

(The designing-in of Cucumber and unit tests is excellent, btw.)

One great idea for user stories came from a previous job where the research debrief workshop for a product team worked the insights into problem charts: what they want to get done, what they're doing now, and the characteristics off a winning solution (not the solution itself, e.g. "we will provide regular status updates they can access at all times").

That right-hand column then is easily translated into user stories: "as an adult making a long-distance multi-stage journey by train for leisure, I want to access regular status updates at all times, so that I can check from my phone on the way if my next train will be delayed."

The clever thing my boss did was number them, so that every user story in Jira could be directly tied back to the original user quote or insight.

It's really interesting interviewing users about how they interpret words and images, and there really are two kinds of people:

The kind who watches videos and hates text, and

The kind who reads text and hates videos.

And they're using the same product.

Despite a fondness for (amateur) art, I am a text thinker: I write in order to organise my thoughts.

A UX Designer friend once challenged me to describe the worst possible product in (category), handing me a pen and a stack of post-it notes.

After two minutes, we looked at each other's work: he had drawn pictures, I had drawn words, but we had conveyed exactly the same ideas.

Perhaps that tells us that both are important - and, most of all, that we should compare notes!