Barbara has always liked looking things up. Her job as a writer and editor for a technical magazine lets her explore new topics for articles. In addition to the Web, she has access to news sources, legal and medical databases, and online publication archives. Recently, a friend was diagnosed with colon cancer. She helped him identify the best hospitals for this cancer and read up on the latest treatments. She looked for clinical trials that might help him, and even read up on some alternative treatments being offered in Mexico and Switzerland. She was glad to be able to find articles in journals she trusted to give her the depth that more popular medical sites lacked.
Stories that illustrate problems
Stories can also be used to illustrate a point of pain—a problem that a new product, or a change in a design, can fix. They are used to help a design or product team see a problem from the perspective of the users.
Sister Sarah sighed. She and Sister Clare ran the youth group in their church, and today they had taken the kids to a Phillies baseball game. They had gotten everyone from the parking lot, through the gates, and into their seats, losing no one in the milling crowd. Sister Sarah was about to go buy some drinks when she realized she’d left the cash in the car.
She stood at the stadium entrance, trying to remember where they had parked. Usually, their small bus was easy to spot, but today it seemed as though every church group in the area had shown up. She saw dozens of vehicles that might be hers.
She closed her eyes and tried to remember the walk to the entrance. Had they turned to the right or the left? Left, she thought, and she headed out toward one of the rows. But that wasn’t her bus.
After 30 minutes of walking in one direction and another, she would have to go back and tell Sister Clare that, once again, she’d failed to pay any attention to where she was going or where they had left the bus. The children would know, she thought. She could take one of them. Again. She couldn’t even phone. Their one mobile phone was back at her seat. She sighed.
This story describes a current problem. In this case, it’s a lost bus in a vast parking lot, and someone without a good way to solve the problem. Did the story make you start thinking of innovative ways to solve Sister Sarah’s problem? There are many different possible solutions, and you probably thought of several. That’s the point of this kind of story: to describe the problem in a way that opens the door to brainstorming new ideas.
Stories that help launch a design discussion
You can also end a story in the middle with an explicit call for a new idea, finishing it with a better ending, or identifying a situation that might open the door to new products. Stories that you will use as a starting point for design brainstorming must have enough detail to make sense, but also leave room for the imagination. Their goal is to open up thinking about a design problem, suggest the general area for work, or start a discussion.
Joan was filling in on payroll while Kathy, the office manager, was away. Kathy left her a message to remind her about some special bonus checks for that week.
Joan had not used the payroll program for a while and only remembered that special checks could be difficult. Reading the Post-it notes on the wall next to the computer, she scanned for instructions and was relieved to find one for bonuses.
Following these brief notes, she found the right screen. Her first try to print the checks came out wrong, and she had to reverse all of the transactions. She puzzled over it some more and finally matched the instructions on the Post-it notes to the messages on the screen. In the end, she managed to get the checks to print, but she also left a note on Kathy’s desk to have her check everything when she returned.
How could you make creating special checks and filling in on bookkeeping tasks easier? Did the story spark your mind for solutions? Have you encountered a similar situation?
Stories that explore a design concept
Stories can help you explain and explore a new idea or concept and its implications for the experience. They help shape a new design by showing it in action, even before all the details are complete.
One way to create an expressive story is with video, although this can be more difficult than a comic, storyboard, or verbal narrative. Bruce Tognazzini, now a member of the Nielsen Norman Group, led a project at Sun Microsystems to envision the future of computing. The result was Starfire: The Movie, a video that imagined a day in the life of a knowledge worker 12 years in the future. Starfire was created in 1992 and set in 2004. It featured a workspace made up of several displays controlled with gestures, well before the movie Minority Report or recent innovations like Microsoft Surface.
Instead of spending time describing problems to solve, the story explored a completely new way of interacting. The events of the story were pretty simple, showing a designer going about her work. It said, “What if all these technologies were in current use?” and told the story as if they were. Starfire’s goal was to provoke new thinking, rather than to prescribe a design in the kind of precise detail needed to build a new product.
The next story also explores unknown territory, in this case an interactive entertainment system that flips the usual shopping and reality TV formulas on their heads.
Bob, Carol, and their 17-year-old son Robert Jr. replaced their old cable system with a new Acme IPTV system. Not only did they have access to all the media they had with their old system, but now they also got special channels with interactive content.
Carol loves soap operas. With the interactive remote, her favorite show, All My Restless Children, becomes a shopping catalogue. If she likes the earrings of the lead actress, she can order them. If she likes her blouse, she can order that, too—right from the TV. And the best part is, no commercials.
Even Bob is getting into it. During the show, he chooses to enter the soap opera’s car contest using the remote and onscreen interface. First place is the lead actress’s 1970 Corvette convertible.
Robert Jr. entered a different contest, where first place is dinner for two with the female lead. Not dinner with the actress who plays the lead, but dinner with her as the character she plays!
But Carol topped them all. Because the interactive options are available even when watching on-demand, late one night, Carol ordered the latest episode and entered the show’s babysitter contest. First place is one night of free babysitting by the lead actor. Does Carol have a baby? No. What a shame if she wins. She’ll have to figure out some other way to occupy the actor’s time.
Stories that prescribe the result of a new design
Prescriptive stories describe the world as it will be in more detail. They are similar to descriptive stories, except they describe a user experience that doesn’t exist yet.
Software specifications often contain prescriptive stories in the form of scenarios that accompany use cases or other narrative ways of describing the user experience. These stories can be quite detailed, especially if they are used to illustrate the requirements documents.