Storytelling tips for UX designers
Your palms are sweaty, your heart is racing — you’re about to present a new idea to teammates and stakeholders.
You’re hopeful about the real-world problems you can solve together. Perhaps you have fresh research, or deep-diving design explorations that have uncovered new opportunities for the team. And so here you are, getting ready to make a design pitch. Your goal is simple. Step one: help others understand and empathize with the core problem. Step two: inspire the team to rally around this problem, pooling resources to improve the overall user experience.
As a UX designer working in tech, this can be a common experience. Every design critique, project update, or team standup is a fresh chance for us to advocate for problems that are crying to be solved. Each meeting is an opportunity to be the voice for the people who use our products every day; to use our design skillset to envision a bigger, bolder future.
To communicate across disciplines, we often lean on data, research and design artefacts. Sometimes we create personas to help the team empathize with the pain-points we’re trying to solve, and we’ll whip up wireframes to illustrate possibilities for a better future. All of these strategies for identifying and solving problems are incredibly valuable, but how do we take them to the next level?
I believe that UX designers will be more impactful if they incorporate storytelling techniques into the design process. 🎉
Examples of incorporating storytelling techniques might include using narrative arcs to frame real-world user experiences. Or perhaps including anecdotes, user quotes, or using figurative language to bring data to life.
In the Storytelling for Influence course from IDEO University, IDEO Design Director Jenn Maer explains that “Dopamine is released during emotionally charged experiences which helps people remember those experiences with greater accuracy…and the brain produces oxytocin after listening to a character driven story. Oxytocin motivates cooperation, so if you want someone to back your cause make your story more human-centered.”
Oxytocin motivates cooperation, so if you want someone to back your cause make your story more human-centered. — Jen Maer, IDEO Design Director
The science behind storytelling and empathy is getting more traction in research studies. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have recently found that narratives and descriptive passages of fiction, help ignite parts of the brain that simulate real world experience. This is a gateway to cultivating empathy in any audience.
Exposure to narrative…can improve… someone’s ability to understand what other people are thinking, feeling, and doing. — Psychology Today
My theory is this: A UX designer who can generate empathy for real-world user problems, is a designer who can motivate a team to get those problems solved. And storytelling techniques provide a practical method to achieve this goal!
And so, without further ado, here are a three strategies to bring storytelling into the UX design process.
Storytelling tip 1: Share your users’s voice with data and research
There’s no substitute for a powerful piece of data, compelling usability trend-lines, or first-hand research from user interviews or surveys.
To truly bring these data points to life in front of a group, add one or two relevant quotes from real people who use the product or feature you’re focused on.
With just a sentence or two, you bring data to life by literally including the voice of your users. I mean, imagine being in a product meeting and seeing a statistic like “85% of our users struggled using this feature.” Now imagine that statistic was followed by a quote from a real person who actually spends time using that product. Immediately it has more persuasive clout. And finally, imagine that quote includes a raw and emotional description of a moment of frustration—or perhaps describes the hopeful excitement of someone sharing their goals for what they hope to use your product to achieve. Suddenly this dry moment in a presentation becomes a story. And that story has a character with real emotions, struggles, triumphs, and goals. And that character’s voice becomes a tool to create empathy and motivate teams to solve real UX problems.
Now, if you want to take this storytelling technique to the next level, try also including audio clips or video recordings that also convey tone-of-voice and human expression. I have to say, the most persuasive design, research, and product presentations I’ve been to have included choice quotes, audio or video clips (and sometimes all three!)
If you’re at a loss for how to get these quotes, never fear! There are a number of ways you can find these gems — like reading chat forums or reviews for your product. You can ask to listen in on your support team’s phone-calls or chats, or set up user interviews and take notes along the way. Look for quotes that are succinct but also have emotional appeal. Ideally they’ll describe a problem or pain-point and explain the impact it has on their workflow or experience using that particular product or feature.
Storytelling tip 2: Creating personas
Personas can all be valuable tools for building empathy and sharing context across your team. But without real-world scenarios, personas quickly fall flat on their metaphorical faces. The problem is when personas are abstracted from real workflows or scenarios, they can quickly seem like fictional characters that are crafted based on a fluffy stack of assumptions. Sadly sometimes this is true —and often in design school we were trained to create personas that were simply collections of assumptions conveniently grouped together under a fake name and generic stock photo.
As an alternative to spending time creating personas, I prefer plotting out real workflows based off of observational research and data. Hot tip: for examples of how to visualize workflows, search for “journey maps” or “emotional journey maps”. The best journey maps go further than illustrating workflows — they’ll also highlight pain-points or opportunities to improve usability at various moments in time. Including data, quotes, or links to research are a fast way to make this kind of design artefact even more compelling!
Now, the cheap and dirty way to share journey maps would be via email or an InVision link or Slack message. But a more impactful way is to give a real-life walk through. On a remote team? Create a video talking your teammates through the user journey; highlighting the problems or opportunities and being the voice of your users.
Another creative approach is to take your journey map designs and print them at poster size! One of our teams in our Montreal office did just this and I stop and read through it every time I’m in the office. They even kept sticky notes and markers nearby, for people on any team to share opinions, and interact with the emotional journey of what our users experience using a particular slice of our product. Boom! Now that’s a fun way to take a moment in the UX design process, and turn it into an interactive and engaging story that represents the voice of our users.
Storytelling tip 3: Sharing wireframes
Wireframes are fun to make and equally exciting to receive; they’re the crystallization of research and manifestation of deep thought in a particular problem space. They show a possibility for how the future of a product could look, feel, and function. In high-fidelity mocks-ups, they can imitate what a product could look like after it’s been built, which can be incredibly motivating— especially for engineers, product managers or marketing strategists!
For all of these reasons, wireframes are incredibly powerful tools. But yes —storytelling can even take wireframing to a new level!
When it comes to wireframes, it’s all about the framing and presentation. The good news is, if you’ve already included user quotes in data presentations and journey maps (see points above), half your work is done!
If you’re presenting to a live audience (or making a video recording), take time to remind your audience how your designs attempt to solve real user problems. Maybe kickoff the presentation with a quote and some data that reminds your audience why they should also care about solving this problem.
If you’re pitching an improvement to an existing workflow, you may want to compare the old feature to your new designs. Or if it’s a net-new feature, you can include visuals of current workarounds or hacks that people might use in lieu of the great new solution you’ve designed. This comparison tells a story of past and future — and gives you a chance to demonstrate if your designs actually do make the product more usable, faster, or more valuable.
If you’re sharing wireframes via static images (like screenshots, PDF’s etc), you may want to try including yellow rectangles and black text that look like post-it notes! I love this technique to share my thought process, or key pieces of context, alongside my designs. And if you’re in InVision there’s always the nifty notes or comments feature that you can use to add context and generate conversations along the way!
These strategies to tell stories about your design process and incorporate the user’s voice along the way, can transform a regular wireframe into a compelling narrative that gets a team excited and rallied around solving specific problems!
Be a share bear 🐻
With all this talk about emotional journey maps and visuals, I decided to summarize the points from this article in an emotional journey map. Hopefully this will be a nifty quick reference for how you can increase your impact as a UX designer, with the power of storytelling! 🎉
If you find these tips useful, please let me know by tapping the little green clappy-hands here in Medium. 👏 I’d be thrilled if you shared this article with others in the community, and if you have any other tips for incorporating storytelling into UX design process, would love to see them in the comments below!
