User goals are high-level activities that the user wants to achieve by using the product.

This helps you focus on "what the user wants" instead of dealing with "what the product could do."

If you run a user persona discovery session, the collected user needs could help you create the user goals too. It often starts with a problem, e.g. "I need an umbrella", so I go to the online webshop where I want to:

During the story mapping session, user goals are placed into the first row.

"opening the search engine"

"adding it to the cart"

"entering my card numbers"

These are more like user steps that describe the way a user persona reaches its goals.

Try to collect user goals based on the narrative flow — it makes it easy to tell the user journey and gives the opportunity to find holes in the user journey.