How much does the audience matter?
Knowing your audience is critical. Whether you can plan in advance, or have to adjust on the fly, you can't tell a good story unless you can get the audience involved. After all, the goal of the story isn't to tell it, but for the audience to hear it and take away something new. See Chapters 3, 10, and 12.
Is it OK to use other people's stories?
When we do user research, one of our goals is to bring back a useful picture of the people we design for. Telling their stories is one way to share what you have learned. But you have to remember that they are human beings who must be treated ethically. See Chapters 4 and 6.
Is this a book about performing stories?
Not really. For performance storytelling, the crafting and telling of stories is a goal in itself. Nor is the book about scriptwriting or writing short fiction. While some of the story structures and ingredients covered in the last section can help add drama to stories, that is not our focus. When we use stories in user experience practice, we borrow from these worlds, but put them to use in new ways. See Chapter 15.
Do you cover storytelling in games?
This is also not a book about narrative hypertext, games, interactive fiction, virtual reality, or immersive interfaces where stories and storytelling are a central feature of the user interface. Although we believe that every interaction tells a story (even if only a mundane one), this book is not primarily about how to weave stories into a digital interactive experience.
If you are interested in how stories are woven into user experience and hypermedia narrative, we can recommend two excellent books:
Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace by Janet H. Murray, which looks at how hypermedia and other new technology can make new forms of story possible.
Computers and Theatre by Brenda Laurel. A seminal book on Aristotelian storytelling as the basis for user experience design.
What's next for storytelling in user experience design?
While working on this book, we have been excited to watch storytelling take off as a useful concept in many more aspects of user experience design. People have started talking about how to make the product tell a story or use story structures to help structure the user experience. Others have borrowed ideas from filmmaking to add emotional resonance to applications and make the concept of designing a better experience more concrete. And there's a swarm of people writing on the topic of storytelling and business management, which touches on some of the same issues as user experience.
There's always another story waiting to be written.
Foreword
Janice (Ginny) Redish has been actively doing user experience design since long before it took on that name. Ginny's books on usability testing (with Joe Dumas) and on user and task analysis (with JoAnn Hackos) have helped many practitioners hone their skills in user research. Her most recent book is Letting Go of the Words—Writing Web Content that Works, published by Morgan Kaufmann.
I've been talking about stories and scenarios—and how useful and powerful they are—for a long time. And I've been wishing for a book that would both make the case for stories in user experience and help us all become better at collecting, crafting, telling, and using stories in our work
Well, here it is. You are holding a book that combines the stories and skills of a professional storyteller who designs user experiences and a user experience designer who tells stories.
Just as personas make users come alive for user experience designers, stories make users' lives real. User experience design is about experience. Stories are those experiences.
As Kevin and Whitney say in this book: We all hear stories. We all tell stories—every day in all parts of our lives. What happened in school today? What happened at work today? How did you manage that? What would you do if...?
As Kevin and Whitney also say, you are probably already hearing stories in the user research that you do. If you write scenarios for design or for usability testing, you are already telling stories. This book will help you do what you are doing—even better.
Stories are immensely powerful, as I realized many years ago on a project to help an airline company understand what happens in travel agencies. For four months, a colleague and I crisscrossed the U.S., spending several hours in each of many types of travel agencies around the country. We watched and listened as travel agents took calls, helped walk-in customers, and told us about their other clients.
When we sifted through our notes back at our hotel at the end of each day, we found ourselves reminding each other of the stories we had heard and seen. Part of the drama in those stories was in the life of the traveler: The father who had promised his daughter that their trip to Disneyland would include renting a red Mustang convertible... The gal who wanted to visit her boyfriend for a weekend but needed a cheap fare... The reporter who had to get to the scene of a disaster in another state immediately... The family planning a once-in-a-lifetime trip to France...
The other part of the drama in those stories was in the work of the travel agents, especially in how difficult it was for them to meet these customers' needs with their current software.
When we reported our findings to the client, we had facts. We had numbers. We had flowcharts. And we had stories—lots of stories. It was the stories that people remembered. It was the stories that became the focal points for innovation in the software.
I wish I'd had this book when doing the project with the travel agents—and for many projects after that. This book will help you become a better story collector, story crafter, story teller, story user—all in the context of your work in user experience design.
The examples (yes, lots of stories, as you'd expect) and the direct, clear advice will help you become
a better listener, so you have users' words to tell their stories
a better observer, so you can include the real context of use in your stories
an ethical storyteller, knowing how to craft stories (like personas) that are archetypically true even if they are composites
an innovative designer, using stories to help teams see problems and solutions in new ways
a person who people enjoy listening to because your stories are both interesting and meaningful for your projects
Have fun!
—Ginny Redish
Chapter 1
Why Stories?