A user story is a pattern of communication commonplace in software development teams. The idea of a user story is simple: nobody cares about your software and your job isn't to write code, it's to solve user's problems, and the pattern is often a way of articulating a user's problem and the proposed solution. The most common pattern, as explained the software management company Atlassian, is:

As a [user persona], I [want to be able to do this task], so that I can [achieve this goal].

I find this pattern a little passive-aggressive, since it never identifies who is going to be providing the solution.