Art and power of storytelling in UX

Priya Saraswat
UX Collective
Published in
7 min readSep 23, 2019

Have you ever felt nostalgic listening to a TV commercial or a song from your childhood? How many times did you end up repeating the whole jingle in your head and sometimes even loudly? Do you remember those bedtime stories? How the tales are still so vivid in your memory?
The element that is common in all these situations is — a Story.

Stories are a powerful tool when it comes to creating a long-lasting impression. Stories are a way to explain the world. Stories are about communication. In his famous book Winning the Story Wars, Jonah Sachs writes, human beings share stories to remind each other of who they are and how they should act. The link between human memory and stories is tightly woven. A good story leaves a memory, a memory that can be recalled and recognized with certain triggers. But let’s not get excited about our ability to recall information shared as stories. Human mind comes with limitation and can hold between four to seven distinct bits of information at a time in the short-term memory. When the time is over, the memory either decays or goes into our long-term memory. It’s believed that long-term memories are stored in different areas across the brain depending on the content. Content that not only plays a huge role in shaping our experience but also in deciding which stories are engaging enough to become part of our memory that can be accessed anytime.

There is a famous experiment by Fritz Heider & Marianne Simmel in the field of interpersonal perception that somewhere also reflects on our brains capabilities when it comes to storytelling.

The participants in the experiment were requested to interpret a moving film of about two and a half minutes duration with three geometrical figures moving in all directions at various speeds. The participants were asked to tell a story of the video. The researchers discovered that participants assigned all kinds of personality characteristics and motives to these simple shapes, generating compelling plots about an ‘aggressive’ large triangle, the ‘helpless’ circle, and the ‘hero’ small triangle. Sometimes the plot centered on love or cheating, or sometimes it was a parenting saga. It was an amazing study that strengthens the fact about how good humans are at storytelling intrinsically.

In our day to day lives, we encounter so many stories. We hear stories in cafes, in our offices, from our friends and family and even when we are thinking on our own, there is a story going on in our head. How many times you’ve been told that everyone is a storyteller? That’s true. However, the stories we tell and hear every minute of our life are very different from the one that we tell as a designer. As designers, we are mostly defining a world for others and trust me narrating someone else’s story is an awfully difficult task. Having said that, it’s not that difficult and all of us are pretty much sharing these stories already. The place we can work a little harder is to make these stories memorable.

In human-centered design, storytelling is the process of creating a compelling narrative arc that places people at the center of the design. It helps us to visualize how the product can become part of people’s lives and ultimately become part of their reality. Call it an art, a technique or just another way of communicating our thoughts but storytelling is no doubt a powerful tool when we think about communicating our design ideas and solutions.

There are two types of stories in the design process. The first one is what we narrate to our team and stakeholders and the second one is what our design communicate to people who are interacting with it.

Let’s talk about some of the UX stories that we create during the design process. Our very first exposure to stories is during the research phase. Ethnographic studies, contextual inquiries, focus groups, interviews and all other forms of research open up a door for us to listen to the stories of our users. These stories influence the design narratives that we share with our team and stakeholders in the future.

To get the real stories flowing all we need is to ask the right questions.

There’s an old saying — You never know a story till you’ve told it a hundred times. Therefore, we should keep our user’s stories with us and share it with the team throughout the design process. It’s important to remember that UX stories aren’t made up but are real stories from experiences of real people. Using the art of storytelling we can bring the team closer to the reality of our audience and help them recognize human connections well before concepts and strategies. Some of the tools to carve these stories are — storyboards, mood boards, use-cases, and user journeys. All these forms of stories help us to present how the product or feature might impact a person’s everyday effectiveness or happiness. They also bring peoples’ experiences closer to the design process.

Some stories that we share and tell during the design process

When we think about the stories that our designs will tell in our absence, we should focus on how the new experience that we design today can become part of people’s stories in the future. Every design is a form of communication, so a positive user experience should have a clear beginning, middle, and end — just like a story. Onboarding flows and walkthroughs are the most common ways we tell a story to new users and to help them recognize elements in our designs. However, it’s important to spend some time on the narrative outside onboarding. A design is well-structured when every element of the design is self-capable of communicating the underlying story to its audience.

But we can’t unleash the power of storytelling without spending time on mastering the art. Like any good story, a UX story also has a plot and a character. Once we identify our plot, we define actions, crises, climax, cliffhangers, and conclusion of our story. Let’s try to understand each of them one by one.

The plots in the UX story can vary depending on the stage of the design process. In early stages, it can be as broad as a discovery, an idea or a problem. While in later stages, plots become specific situations, use cases and scenarios.

The character or hero of our story is the persona or target segment. Character helps anchor the story and also drive design conversations around their reality and needs.

In some cases, we start with a plot. This is often true for established organizations and products where we identify painpoints in existing workflows and identify the specific target group that will be most impacted by the changes in the experience. In other cases, we start with a character like a startup targeting needs of a specific audience. The personality, emotions, and motivations of this audience will point to the plot that is most important to the story.

Actions or tasks in a UX story are the activities our character will perform when they are inside the plot. Actions help us to understand people’s capabilities and points of views and how we can support them through our designs.

Crises in the story is a stage of uncertainty, confusion, demotivation, and helplessness in our character’s journey.

Once we have identified our plot, characters and their actions plus their moment of crises, it’s time to determine the climax.

At climax or the emotional peak, our heroes want an answer to their problems. At this time, we introduce our product or feature in the story to help our heroes move forward in their journey. During the climax, the users go through multiple rounds of choices and comparisons to figure out if the product is what they were looking for this whole time.

Climax either follow a cliffhanger or a conclusion. A cliffhanger in UX is a stage where the character is left in a difficult situation without offering any resolution of conflicts which causes an unexpected exit and brings the end to the story. It’s important to identify cliffhangers in our story to avoid a gloomy end.
The counterpart of the climax is an anticlimax. In UX story, an anticlimax is a situation where our users already know that our product is the answer to their needs either through word of mouth or previous experience. So they skip the climax part to conclude the story where their goals are met.

As the story concludes, we try to introspect what changes our product brought into the life of its user. Conclusion in UX story is not an end rather food for thoughts that can lead us to build our next big story.

A story is successful when it’s audience leaves with a clear understanding of the emotions and answers wrapped in it and a good storyteller is the one who practices the art rather believing that he or she has acquired it.

Every product we design and every idea we bring to life through our designs are unique. So unless we haven’t spent time on our story, it’s highly unlikely that our designs will be able to establish a relationship with its audience.

The psychological explanation to process stories is rooted more deeply than any other form of content. When we hear a good story, it’s believed that our body releases a hormone called oxytocin. In one of Forbes article, oxytocin is described as the drug of storytelling.

And now when we know the art and power of storytelling, let’s induce this chemical (drug sounds little weird and so is chemical but out of words here and you got the sentiments, correct?) in our users by creating compelling and engaging product stories that they cherish and share.

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Written by Priya Saraswat

Passion for me is to discover solutions that resonate with human emotions. Happiness for me is to write about those design thinking moments.

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