Why stories are integral to Product Design
A designer or entrepreneur can come up with the most innovative and wonderful ideas in humanity, but if people aren’t at the centre of the concept, it will never work. We need to keep in mind how the customer will consume, experience and use our product, and the best way to get a grounded understanding of this is through using User Stories.
In this article I’ll be looking at what a story is, what the benefits are and finally how to craft a rounded, useful user story.
We grow up reading and using stories, and user stories are hardly any different. We create a world that our users are living in with a ‘who’, a ‘why’, a ‘what’ and a ‘how’. As Burroway (1999) and Mckee (1997) notes, stories should include fleshed out characters and setting, dramatic elements, well-formed plotlines and enough detail to understand the people who will use a system and the value it will bring into their lives.
They are different to ‘Scenarios’ which focus on the user’s journey solely with our product. Instead they take a deeper look into the ‘why’ — the users environment, their abilities, and their goals. Why are they using this product? What brought them to this stage? What is their end goal and how are we helping them to get there? These are the questions we seek to answer when developing our User Stories.
Why should you prioritise stories?
Stories are highly valuable in a number of ways — anywhere within the product lifecycle, not just at conception. They can be highly valuable in the user feedback stages; it helps our focus group to empathise with the protagonist, and jogs memory of times where they have been in the same situation. Rather than focussing on an alien technology it helps them to see the bigger picture and how it could work in their environment.
On the opposite side of the spectrum it’s also a useful tool to highlight the uses and benefits of your technology to stakeholders, helping them to understand the reason for their investment, and from a marketing and sales perspective it gives them a useful message to incorporate into their conversations.
If you use story telling from the very beginning it helps to ensure all angles have been addressed - rather than the team missing key usability issues whilst focussing on the technical development of the product, it helps the team to keep people at the centre of their work. By doing this it also aligns their decision making with that, where some teams are possibly damaging their market value by putting tech in the driving seat (what’s easier to implement? what’s cheaper?). Ultimately compelling stories deliver compelling designs — and that is the key point.
User Story Criteria
So how would we put this all together? Your stories should include:
- Name
- Age
- Location
- Goals
- Environment
This doesn’t have to be a long exercise, you just want to get a feel for the person and their background, and then you’re able to examine how your product would interact with their environment. Alternatively you can get as in-depth as you like (such as the above image), and further bring your subject to life through relaying this story to others in your team, user groups, stakeholders or potential investors.
To conclude, User Stories are an invaluable way to put yourself into the shoes of your potential users, ensuring that the product is relatable and valuable for your target market. The technique can be used any stage within the product lifecycle, and has multiple benefits in each. You can see some sketches of my own ‘User-Stories’ for a current project to the left, and I’d love to see your own examples!
