John is a 32-year-old who had been working for a mid-size company. He recently decided to start his own consulting company and is currently working as a sole proprietor.
John wants to take the money out of his former employer’s pension plan and open a new account at YourMutuals, where he can roll over the pension money without tax consequences and then start adding to it himself every year.
He begins by signing on to the YourMutuals Web site with his username and security password. He finds the link to open an account and fills in several forms with information about the type of account he wants to create. When he is done, he sees that the new account is now listed on his home page along with his IRA accounts.
He picks up the letter with the information about the pension plan. It says there is an option to transfer his money into a new account directly. Clicking on the account, he sees that “Transfer funds from another account” is one of the options. He enters the plan name, bank name, and his old member account number. When he is done, he gets a message that says that his money will be available as soon as the transfer is confirmed. He prints out the message and signs off.
The next day, he gets an email from the pension plan confirming the transfer and giving him a phone number to call, in case the information is incorrect. When he goes online to YourMutuals, he can now see that the new retirement account shows the correct amount deposited to it.
Now, he can decide which mutual funds he wants to invest in.
This story could continue to describe more steps in the process or other functions that John could use. This is not a programming specification, but a narrative description of an interaction.
More work? Not really!
Perhaps you think, “There’s quite enough to do without adding anything else to my process.”
Don’t worry. If you already have a good user experience process, you are probably already collecting and using stories. This book can help you do it more consciously and more effectively.
If your process doesn’t include much contact with users, this might be a good time to start. You’ll find that it improves your work, and gives you more confidence that you are creating something people will really find useful and usable.
Either way, collecting stories and telling them as you work on a design will make your work richer and more innovative.
The radio show This American Life, from U.S. National Public Radio, tells stories of everyday experiences. Each show takes a theme and looks at it from different perspectives, each based on a real person’s story. Ira Glass, the producer, blends journalism and storytelling to create oddly compelling portraits.
“Until you hear a story and you can understand that experience, you don’t know what you are talking about. There has to be a person’s story that you hear, where finally you get a picture in your head of what it would be like to be that person. Until that moment, you know nothing, and you deal with the information you are given in a flawed way.”
—Ira Glass, This American Life,
speaking at GEL 2007
(gelconference.com/videos/2007/ira_glass/)
More reading
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, Janet H. Murray. How hypermedia and other new technology can make new forms of story possible.
Computers and Theatre, Brenda Laurel. A seminal book on Aristotelian storytelling as the basis for user experience design.
Summary
Stories are a powerful tool in user experience design. They can help you understand users—and their experiences—better, communicate what you’ve learned, and use that understanding to create better products. Whether you are a researcher, designer, analyst, or manager, you will find ideas and techniques you can put to use in your practice.
Stories have many uses in user experience design and can be integrated into your own process.
They can describe a context or situation, like stories that are part of personas.
They can illustrate problems and “points of pain,” explaining why a new experience is needed.
They can be the starting point for a design discussion, explore a new design concept, or describe a new design.
Chapter 2
How UX Stories Work
Stories are more than just narrative
Stories have many roles in user experience design
Some people think of telling a story as a form of broadcasting. Claude Shannon, sometimes called the “father of information theory,” looked at communication as a sort of transmission of a message from one place to another. From this perspective, a story would be something simply transferred from one person to another, like an exchange of goods or a signal on a wire, as shown in Figure 2.1.
This seems simple enough. You write a story, and then you tell it. You might consider your audience as you write the story, but telling the story is just broadcasting it. A lot of bad speakers seem to see it this way as well.
But it’s not that simple.
Good storytelling is interactive. It’s more like a conversation than a broadcast, even when the stories are carefully crafted and rehearsed. Actors and directors talk about how the audience is different at every performance, even if the script or the stage action is the same from night to night.
Stories work the same way. They are as much a part of the audience as of the storyteller. They come to life in the imaginations of the audience members, whether it is one person or hundreds of people.
Figure 2.1
Some people think of stories as a broadcast, a one-way communication from storyteller to audience.
Figure 2.2
The Story Triangle shows the connection between storyteller and the audience: the audience hears the story, but also shares their reactions with the storyteller.
This is especially true when you are telling a story in person, as part of a presentation or in a discussion. The story becomes part of a dialogue between the storyteller and the audience, even if the audience is silent. This set of relationships between the storyteller, the story, and the audience is called the Story Triangle (shown in Figure 2.2). It defines the interdependency of these three elements in any story experience. You can see how