Figure 2.6
We fill in details about a story from our own culture and experiences.
The positive side of this is that the more the audience draws on their own lives and experiences, the more the story becomes their own. In the process, it elicits other shared stories, building connections.
On the other hand, when you and the audience bring different cultural assumptions to a story, it opens up opportunities for misunderstanding. Or opportunities for distraction, as the audience veers away from the point you want to make.
So, a story is more than just a transfer of information. It’s an active mechanism for communicating events, communicating contextual information, and for developing connections between people.
This active role is what makes stories so useful in user experience design. One of the hardest parts of your work is understanding other people—people who may have different motivations and goals than your own. All of the user research and analytics techniques are a way to bridge that gap. Stories are not only a good way to learn about users, but also a good way to share what you have learned with your colleagues (and anyone else who has a stake in your work).
Stories have many roles in user experience design
Some of the most important roles that stories can play in a user experience design process are the following:
They explain.
They engage the imagination.
They spark new ideas.
They create a shared understanding.
They persuade.
Stories explain
Most stories offer a description of events—a narrative. They place a set of actions into a time and place, arranging them into a sequence.
When she was on her way to the store, she…
User experience stories often focus on explaining those events. They can describe behavior and emotional attitudes, showing how the people in the stories react to the events.
Every time he tried to enter the 26-digit code, he got a message that the two fields did not match. Every time it happened, he got a little angrier, and hit the keyboard a little harder…and typed the code a little less accurately. Finally….
They can also add context to actions, providing an explanation for motivation or the goals driving the behavior.
She wanted to get to Charleston for her cousin’s wedding, but was on a tight budget. As she looked for the cheapest way to travel, she visited site after site: big travel sites, airlines, budget travel sites, auctions, trains, even car rentals. It was hard to compare her options because none of them gave her the full cost with all the expenses added up.
Placing a character in a context and communicating not just the events, but also using the imagery of the sensory experience is what differentiates a story from other techniques for modeling interaction, like flow charts and use cases. Some of the best storytellers are people who can present a collection of rules or facts as a story that you can easily remember. For example, they can illustrate the importance of guidelines for good design and usability by revealing what can happen when you ignore them.
This is not just about being entertaining. A good story weaves together causes and effects in a narrative so you can best remember them. It captures context and tacit knowledge and does so more efficiently than any other form of communication.
Stories engage the imagination
Stories engage the imagination of the listener, help the listener make intuitive leaps that surpass linear logic, and evoke new ideas. They rely on the way listeners create mental images, because they fill in the gaps and complete the images to fully create the story.
I’m walking around a particularly busy and noisy part of Tokyo, with dense crowds and music playing, and I see a sign pointing around a corner that seems to indicate that there’s a shrine down there.
So I turn right and walk down the cross street. As I walk, the air seems to change, because it gets quieter and quieter the farther I walk. The shrine is only a short block away from the main street with all its noise and crowds, but by the time I get to the shrine, it’s quiet. It’s peaceful. It’s like there’s a force field of peace surrounding this shrine.
I walk into this shrine, start walking through it on wide wooden floorboards, and it’s so quiet. There are other people there walking by me, with me, and around me, but everyone is quiet. These people walked through the same frenetic noise that I walked through to get there, but everyone is quiet and respectful as we walk through this beautiful building.
I make my way to the center of the building where there is this Zen garden. I’m compelled to sit down on the edge and be with the huge rock in the middle of beautifully combed pebbles. I sit and let my eyes follow the path of the pebbles. I can hear my breathing. I can hear my heartbeat. I can hear my thoughts. All I can do in the middle of this patch of tranquility, in the middle of this gigantic busy, noisy metropolis, is sit and listen to the silence.
There was no place I knew—in the busy metropolis where I live—that is so easy to reach in the middle of the noise, where I could find such peace.
Now, let’s think about what you’ve learned from this story. Kevin told this story to a group of UX folks at a UsabilityNJ meeting and asked them what they saw in the story. Here’s how they replied:
What was the street like?
Answer: You said the street was very noisy. It was turning the corner, I think, that I could just visualize, just from the way you described it, just gradually walking to the silence, to the peace from that noisy, chaotic area. From the noise into this peaceful area Zen garden.
What color was the sign for the shrine that you saw?
Answer: It was white and the arrow was black.
Anyone else see the sign?
Answer: It had some kind of picture on it of a building, something that somehow indicated the shrine. I knew you couldn’t read the words so I was picturing that there must be some kind of design on it.
What color was the shrine; did anyone see the shrine?
Answer: Bamboo.
Answer: I’m seeing a green shrine.
Answer: Stone shrine.
Answer: And small.
What color were the rocks in the Zen garden?
Answer: Gray.
Answer: Beige and brown.
Answer: Different shades of gray.
We don’t know what that shrine really looked like: bamboo, stone, or green. Kevin’s story omitted that detail. But each person imagined a specific place, filled in the details so they were seeing a place almost as real to them as Kevin’s memory is to him.
Stories spark new ideas
Because we instinctively fill in the gaps, stories can hint at details, rather than