We'll cover more about using stories (and listening) in Chapter 10, "Sharing Stories," when we talk about sharing stories as part of managing.
More reading
MathWorks distributes these links about active listening to the UX team. They are drawn from a variety of contexts—business, agricultural labor management, family counseling, and corporate training—but all have a similar emphasis.
Eight Barriers to Effective Listening:
www.sklatch.net/thoughtlets/listen.html
Mind Tools's Active Listening:
www.mindtools.com/CommSkll/ActiveListening.htm
Empathic Approach—Listening First Aid: www.cnr.berkeley.edu/ucce50/ag-labor/ 7article/listening_skills.htm
Empathic Listening:
www.beyondintractability.org/essay/empathic_listening/
7 Tips for Effective Listening: findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m4153/is_4_60/ai_106863366/?tag=content;col1
10 Tips to Effective & Active Listening Skills: http://powertochange.com/students/people/listen/
Summary
Good listening can be contagious. We started this chapter by saying that stories start with listening. When you get in the habit of really listening, you may be surprised to discover how many stories you will hear. You are listening more, so you will have more opportunities. Because you are listening more deeply, the stories you find will be more useful, meaningful, and interesting.
Listening carefully allows you to hear subtext and overtones in what people say, especially when you combine it with observing them.
When you allow people time to speak, they can think more carefully about what they are saying and share deeper thoughts.
You can learn to be a good listening, using active listening techniques.
Chapter 4
The Ethics of Stories
Good research ethics—good storytelling
Professional societies give us relevant ethics for stories
Acknowledge your own influence
We have already talked about the triangular relationship between story, storyteller, and audience. But there’s a second triangle.
This triangle is critical for user experience, where you use stories collected from real people. This triangle switches the relationships around. At the beginning of the process, you are the listeners, and your ethnographic informants, usability participants, or research interlocutors are the storytellers (see Figure 4.1).
Figure 4.1
When you create and tell a user experience story, it is one you have originally collected from another person. Your retelling of the story creates a connection between the user from whom you originally heard the story and your audience.
Because you are using material from other people in your user experience stories, you have an ethical responsibility not only to the story, but to your sources as well.
Good research ethics—good storytelling
There is no conflict between research ethics and storytelling. A story is not just a collection of facts, but of information structured to appeal to an audience’s logic and emotion. To be a good storyteller in user experience, you need honesty and authenticity, along with a simplicity or clarity of expression. These are tools the storyteller uses in any application of storytelling to craft the material and the presentation so that the audience sees something new.
An honest story portrays user research accurately, not distorting the evidence through the selection of the story or the details that are included.
An authentic story is true to the feeling of the original events, and it is told in a way that reflects how the participants themselves might tell it.
When you tell a story with simplicity, you use just enough details to be clear and to help your audience recognize the honesty and authenticity of the story and no more.
Stories and storytelling are very powerful parts of the human experience. It’s not simply that people happen to enjoy stories; they need them and want to believe them. Where pure logic and reason are not effective, stories provide a form of reason that is often so effective that it moves people to thought and action.
This means that storytellers have an important ethical responsibility to their audience and possibly to the world. History is full of examples of people who have told good stories, in the right way, at the right time, to the right audience, and moved them to radical change—sometimes for good, but often enough not. Every revolution or coup starts with a good story. And after a revolution, it is often the storytellers—the artists, the journalists—of the former regime who are silenced.
At this point one might think, “But I’m just redesigning the Web site for my startup. I’m not interested in regime change.” Fine. Understand, though, that the tools for both are the same. Stories and storytelling are important for design in part because stories can shape and change minds. Use that power well and use it wisely.
Professional societies give us relevant ethics for stories
The Code of Ethics of the American Anthropological Association addresses many of the issues that you must consider when creating stories from user research material. This includes your responsibility to the people with whom you work and those you study. Their guidelines begin with the overarching requirement to “avoid harm to the individuals or groups you work with” (including both your colleagues and people you meet during user research), and they continue with four specific requirements that are just as relevant to stories as to any other user research.
Actively establish a working relationship that is beneficial to everyone involved.
Do everything