Storytelling as a UX superpower
Note: This article is based on a talk that I gave at Leadership by Design: Home Edition. If you want to see the slides, they’re up on Slideshare.
Many folks who know me publicly know me from some books and videos on Drupal and design I published for O’Reilly several years ago. What people may not know is that while I’ve been doing design since 1995ish, I’ve been writing since 1991.
My first published piece was a short poem, published in my high school’s literary journal in 1992. It read,
As I reach for a star
and pull,
the sky breaks
and I fall into
the abyss.
What was remarkable about this moment wasn’t the attention I got from my classmates; it was actually published anonymously. But the school’s guidance counselor, who was on the committee for the journal, reached out to me after I submitted it to see if I was okay (tl;dr, I was 16 — of course I wasn’t). That, combined with the fact that I’d been doing theatre for a couple of years at that point, really cemented the idea that stories matter.
Everything that we do, no matter how mundane, has a story. Stories are a fundamentally human way in which we make sense of the world, connect with other human beings, and share knowledge. And as we grow in our design careers, we understand this implicitly. The most usable and beautiful prototypes, backed by the most rigorous research, can not succeed if we can’t get our Engineers to build them, or our Product partners to prioritize the work. Stories play a critical role in that process; if you can tell a compelling story about the problem you’re solving, and how this particular solution addresses that problem, you can move meaningful work forward.
It’s not just scenarios
Often, when we talk about storytelling in UX, we’re focused on design scenarios, which help ground our designs in a particular experience we want to create for our users. An example from my work might be:
A 20-year-old woman goes to see her OB for chronic pelvic pain due to endometriosis. After looking at her chart, the OB realizes that the patient has tried several interventions, including pain medication and hormone therapy, and nothing has worked. She decides to refer the patient to a surgeon for a consultation.
It’s easy to see the value of scenarios, both in terms of setting the stage for detailed design work, and for driving a compelling vision of a new future. But stories are inherent to everything we do, beyond design scenarios. Stories live in:
- the metrics we choose to define success
- the data we use to inform our decisions
- the business cases we create for our work
And most importantly, stories need to live in the way we talk about our work with our colleagues and stakeholders.
Pick a flavor
In my experience, stories in UX come in three flavors:
- Explain. These stories set the stage for a deeper conversation, by describing what exists today. Examples include usability findings, research insights, etc.
- Persuade. These are the stories we love to pay attention to. You’ve laid the groundwork in Explain, showed the current state, and now you’re contrasting that to a new, better, vision that people will buy into. These are your vision decks, storyboards, even the case studies you put in your portfolio.
- Align. These are the stories which, in my experience, don’t get enough attention. We’ve heard the explanation of the current state, we’ve bought into the story that persuades — now we’re capturing our alignment to what we’re actually going to execute on.
While the first two types of stories are important to set the stage, Align stories are the most essential to moving work forward. They have the most longevity, and they’re the most ubiquitous of the three flavors. They’re also the most important to get right, because they’ll be told over and over again, each time you present your work — and they’ll evolve with the project.
The structure of a story
Now that we know about the different types of stories, let’s look at how to make the most of each type of story. The Elements, Tone and Altitude of a story are essential to its success.
Elements
Story elements are pretty easy to recognize; if you’ve read fiction before, you know them. You have a character, who’s in a situation; a conflict arises and the characters need to find a resolution, which has an impact. If we apply this to our scenario from earlier, it’s easy to see this pattern:
But the elements of the story may change depending on its complexity and purpose. For example, the scenario listed above may have a second act, that occurs as the specialist office tries to schedule the patient. In another type of story, such as a research finding, you may want to move elements around to make the story more compelling.
Tone
The tone of a story helps us create the emotional connection we’re looking for. In Explain, we’re keeping things Pragmatic and matter of fact, but bringing in some Sympathy, since we’re trying to convey user pain. In Persuade, we’re shifting to a more Visionary and Urgent tone, while bringing in a sense of Pride about how we solved the user’s pain (conveyed through Sympathy).
In Align, we bring things back to a mix of Pragmatic and Sympathy, but we add a sense of Optimism as we talk about the impact of our solution.
In the problem statement/business rationale above, we lead with sympathy, sharing a concise description of the character’s situation and conflict, then bring a pragmatic tone to our proposed resolution before making an optimistic statement of the impact we expect to bring.
Altitude
Finding the right altitude for a story can make or break its effectiveness in the telling, and it’s where I see teams trip up most often. At 5 feet, you’re deep into the weeds. You might be talking about a usability finding, or debating an interface element. When you’re talking about findings from more foundational research or discussing an entire workflow, you want to move up to about 5,000 feet.
When you start getting to the 10,000 and 30,000 feet range, you’re starting to take a big problem space and break it out into easily understandable themes. This is where the magic happens, especially in Persuade stories; when you’re working on big, hairy problems, being able to simplify that complexity into a clear set of business or user problems is essential to helping teams understand how their work fits into the bigger picture.
As we saw with Tone earlier, Altitude tends to move up and back down as you move through the three-story flavors; in Explain, you’re ranging from 5ft-10,000ft depending on what level of thing you’re trying to explain; as you get to Persuade, you want to move up to 5,000–30,000 ft to drive excitement about the big picture. When you get into Align, you want to bring things back down. At 30,000ft, you’re aligning on the big problems in the space; at 10,000ft you’re breaking down the problem space into discrete features you’re going to execute on, and when you’re back at 5ft, you’re debating the execution details.
Principles for better storytelling
So how can you put these things into practice? In addition to the structural elements above, here are some guiding principles I’ve found useful for successful storytelling.
- Know what kind of story you’re telling. Way too often, teams focus on either an Explain or a Persuade story when they should really be in Align mode. The impact of this is that the story sounds either like a matter-of-fact description of what is before we’ve aligned on things, or like they’re desperate to get people to agree with them every time they talk about the work. By knowing when you’re in Align mode and focusing your energy on reminding people of your shared understanding of the problem being solved, you can improve the conversations you have during the process.
- Don’t drown people in data. One of the biggest traps people fall into when telling stories is trying to throw every possible number or qualitative detail into their story. This makes the listener either tune out of the story, or worse — think you aren’t thinking strategically enough. Focus instead on identifying the overall theme, and choose just enough data to ground your thesis. Additional data points are most useful when you get questions about the main point.
- Lead with the human element. It’s tempting to depend on analytics to tell the story of outcomes. But if you can’t tie the story back to something a human can see or feel — or how this work will solve a human problem — the numbers are meaningless. Even with largely technical changes, you should be able to articulate how this work will set us up to better meet user needs.
- Have a clear point of view. Even when you’re in an Explain story, you need to share a compelling point of view on why this particular story matters. Without that, people will lose interest, and you won’t be able to move on to Persuade.
Wrapping things up
I hope this article has given you some insight into how stories can shape our work in a multitude of ways, and some tools for success. Being thoughtful about how we structure and tell stories about our work can be critical to its success.
For more on stories
- Scenarios and Storyboards: Getting to Structure and Flow, Kim Goodwin, Webstock ‘17
- Ethos, Pathos and Logos, pathosethoslogos.com
- Kurt Vonnegut Diagrams the Shape of Stories in a Master’s Thesis Rejected by U. Chicago, openculture.org
- The 22 rules of storytelling, according to Pixar, Cyriaque Lamar, Gizmodo
- Storytelling for User Experience: Crafting Stories for Better Design, Whitney Quesenbery and Kevin Brooks
- Resonate: Present Visual Stories that Transform Audiences, Nancy Duarte
