Why I Tell Stories

User Experience designers tell stories. It’s not that we lie; we just like to imagine what the world could be. Well, we should. Storytelling in design is a powerful way of understanding what we’re designing and why we’re designing it the way that we are. Scenarios depict the ideal world for a the users we design for. It’s one of my favorite tools and a powerful communicative device.

I’m not new to storytelling. It’s a well understood method of understanding a system from the perspective of the hypothetical user. That said I’m often surprised by how few people employ the technique. I have my method for story telling as well a perspective on how to use narrative to create better systems. That’s what I hope to impart to you here.

One of the check-points of any design process is the “is this making anyone’s life better?” question. Stories are one method of finding out. Narratives require a person; a vehicle through whom the story is told. The advantage to having a person walk through a system you’ve only started to imagine is that they provide a ready made vehicle to test drive your concept as well as find inspiration for along their journey. That’s part of it.

For me, as for many I am sure, there are four pieces to writing out the user’s experience. They are:

1. The Person

They are the vehicle. Not any old person will do. Writing a good story requires you have a person in mind, someone you’ve fleshed out enough to make the story you’re writing have some flesh. A real person (or persona) gives you the tools to tell if forcing yourself to make a system work for a person that the system won’t work for.

2. Requirements and Considerations

This may be one of my favorite outcomes of good storytelling. We’re all familiar with business requirements and rules. Writing from the perspective of a human being lets us take a step away from business requirements and understand the requirements of the person in the first person.

Within each narrative there are little surprises waiting. You may have not realized that Suzy was going to press back, she might have a sudden call for a job interview and needs her session saved automatically… how does she know that the system is saving her session…what if she’s on a public computer? Lots to think about.

The flow and the considerations add up and abstract to requirements for the user. These are what I fondly call ‘User Requirements’. Where these map back to business requirements GREAT. Where they don’t some thinking is required. Either way this is a critically important part of storytelling that I’m pretty sure you won’t get as well with any other method.

3. Stories outline a flow

Narratives have a flow. This sequence of events may inform hierarchy on a page or they may help you identity a sequence of events within the system you’re designing. Either way, a collection of stories map directly to a flow and that as we all know is great!

4. It’s a Thinking Process

The narrative itself is a vehicle. It’s a means of thinking through scenarios and journeys. As we write that little piece of the world we’re writing about starts to have some flesh around it. As that happens we see a little more clearly. That’s an important part of thinking. What we’re doing is feeding our imagination, clarifying the vision and if we’re lucky getting a little inspiration along the way. Just think about all those time you though “wouldn’t it be cool if…”, well that’s what happens when we write our stories.

5. The Perfect World

Well we know it’s not really but, we can pretend it is – for someone else. In a perfect world what would something be like? That’s the joy of writing a story around a user’s experience. We can create that perfect scenario. from there we have a platform we can talk to as we engage the rest of the design process. The perfect world scenario in practice outlines the requirements we need to consider for the people we’re designing for.

But, there is more to storytelling than that. To write a good story you need to have enough of a person fleshed out to understand their world. From there empathy builds and as you write you’ll find yourself thinking through that person’s world. The person you are writing through has, as we all do a context. They’re situated in life in the same way we are. They go to work, they have anxieties and constraints and like most of us who use technology, they use it for a reason; often a prescribed reason. Story writing allows us to perform a gut check as to whether of not that reason is easily met by the system we’re creating.

The important thing about writing a story is that you get into the 1st person state of mind. You might write in the third person by using sentences like “Suzy hits the back button to discover that the information she entered is still there” but, in our minds we need to be there as we write. If we’re not, well then it’s an intellectual excercise only and that kinda misses the point.

Another dimension of story writing that helps good design as opposed to “I met the requirements design” is that it removes you the architect from business requirements. Business requirements do a poor job of expressing the needs and the context of the user. They ought to do a good job of stating the things a system needs to be able to do but, as we al know that’s the difference between a mediocre grade point average and a a really good one. Get that story in front of your client, get them to think about it as a real world case and there is something to talk about; a conversation about people using systems not systems that perform business functions alone.

All this is great but, what happens when you’ve written that story; how will it really impact your design. Well, I can only tell you how I’ve used them to date. This may change as I read more and use them in a wider context of applications. But, for me the practical benefit is clear.

Stories Directly inform design

The flow, the considerations and the requirements inform design. they don’t just flesh out our design work they make it more substantial. It’s for these reasons that from my point of view storytelling is very important to the work that we do.

It’s hard to get people on board with writing a good set of scenarios. There are plenty of places that don’t understand the value of a good persona. Of course you need people on board to get to a place where you can create personas but, writing stories is a lot easier to do without total buy in from a team. It just requires a little time, thought and allowing yourself to get into the head space of another person. Here’s a quick and dirty technique that can be done either on your own or as a group:

1. List all the possible users of a system:
2. - Be granular. Are they a single mother, are they retired, are they doing home study after work
3. Choose one (easy enough)
4. Write out as many life attributes as you can
5. Start listing all the things that they would need to make their life better by using the system you’re designing
6. Start writing a story around them

And there you have it, a person (not quite a persona), a list of things that will contextualize their life and a story that speaks to them.

Please feel free to list any comments. Maybe you have some stories you’d like to share.