We all tell stories. It’s one of the most natural ways to share information, and it’s as old as the human race. This book is about how to use a skill you already possess in a new way: in the field of user experience (UX) design.
As a part of user experience design, stories serve to ground your work in a real context. They let you show a design concept or a new product in action, or connect a new idea to the initial spark. But most importantly, they help you keep people at the center of your work. However you start a project, in the end it will be used by people. Stories are a way of connecting what you know about those people (your users) to the design process, even if they can’t always be part of your team.
Stories can be used in many ways throughout any user experience process:
They help us gather (and share) information about users, tasks, and goals.
They put a human face on analytic data.
They can spark new design concepts and encourage collaboration and innovation.
They are a way to share ideas and create a sense of shared history and purpose.
They help us understand the world by giving us insight into people who are not just like us.
They can even persuade others of the value of our contribution.
Here’s one way that stories can be part of user experience design.
The Open University (OU) is the largest university in the UK. Its programs are offered through distance learning, so its Web site is critical to connecting students to the university and helping potential students find out about it.
One of our ongoing projects is the online prospectus, the catalog of academic programs offered by OU. Originally, this prospectus was presented like a typical catalog or database, starting with a list of departments and drilling down to specific courses. This design assumed that most people would be looking for the details of a particular course.
But we were wrong. We found out instead that students wanted to talk about their dreams. For example, one was bored in his job and wanted to make a change into something more challenging. Another loved being a party planner, but wanted to build his career from a part-time endeavor into a full-scale business that would make his fiancée proud. They told us how the OU had helped them succeed beyond their teachers’ expectations. Or how they had found that they really loved studying, or had discovered an aptitude for science through the short courses. A few people had a simple, straightforward goal like “Get a degree in psychology,” but most were deciding not only what they wanted to study, but where they wanted their studies to take them.
In one usability test, an older Pakistani woman, Priti, had put off her own education to raise her family. Now, she wanted to get the university degree she’d missed when she was younger. Her first course, she thought, should be the one that would help her with her English reading skills and get her back into good study habits.
She and a friend worked diligently, reading each page carefully. They talked through each decision, and had good reasons for each link they chose. But in the end, they selected an upper level linguistics course, which would have been completely wrong for her. The cues about the level and content of the course that seemed so obvious to us were just invisible to them. How could a course called English Language and Learning not be perfect?
It happens that the OU has a program specifically for people like Priti. Opening courses are a gentle introduction to university study skills like re-learning how to write essays, and they would have been a perfect match. So it wasn’t just that she had picked a bad starting point; she had missed a really good one.
This wasn’t a case of a single usability problem that could be fixed in a simple way. The site just wasn’t speaking her language.
This story, and many more that we collected, convinced the team that we needed to engage people in the idea of the subject before pushing them to choose their first course. We started talking about needing to tell the story of the subjects that you could study at the OU.
More importantly, we had to find ways to help them think about how to plan their education. The site offered good guidance about planning a student’s time, but we’d seen that the best reactions occurred when we presented small personal stories like this one on the Web site:
David Beckenham got his Bachelor of Laws (Honours) through the Open University. Here is how he managed his time:
It was six years’ hard work, 16+ hours a week for me, and I missed watching television, but it was definitely worth it in the end. I kept Sundays free so that I could relax and spend time with the family, but I always made sure that I set aside the right amount of time each evening and on Saturdays to keep up with the timetable. That meant sometimes I had to work to 1 a.m., but I always did it.
It makes sense. Stories like this one, or a video welcome from a course lecturer, help students make a connection, translating dry information into personal terms.
What’s the next step? More ways for the community to share its own stories.
What is a story?
Story and storytelling are such big concepts that we’d better start by defining what kinds of stories are helpful in user experience design.
In this book, we will be focused on stories whose goal is to describe or communicate some aspect of user experience. We will include scenarios, user stories, stories for personas, storyboards, (some) narrative use cases, and many other story forms that are part of different user experience methodologies.
As far as the mechanics go, we’ll include all forms of storytelling:
A story can be written or spoken.
A story can be told through pictures, moving images, or words.
A story can be told live or through recorded audio or video.
A story can have a beginning, middle, and an end—usually, though not necessarily, in that order—or it can simply suggest a time and place.
Types of stories we are not talking about include: bedtime stories, stories about that really cute thing you did as a child, news stories, stories about cats rescued from trees, shaggy dog stories, ghost stories, novels, love stories, confessions, how I met your father (unless we’re designing a dating service), the end of the world, the beginning of the world, and dreams (not to be confused with conceptual visions). We love these stories, but they are for another book, and a context outside user experience design.
There are many types of stories in UX design
Stories can be a natural and flexible way of communicating. Some of the values often attributed to stories include their effectiveness as a way to help people remember, as a way to persuade, and as a way to entertain. This is as true in UX as anywhere else.
User experience includes a wide variety of disciplines, each with its own perspective. Stories bridge the many different languages you bring to your work. By providing tangible examples, stories can provide a common vocabulary for everyone.
Stories can describe a context or situation.
Stories can illustrate problems.
Stories can be a launching point for a design discussion.
Stories can explore a design concept.
Stories can describe the impact of a new design.
Stories that describe a context or situation
Stories that describe the world as it is today help us understand that world better. They not only describe a sequence of events, but they also provide insight into the reasons and motivations