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ОглавлениеStorytelling for User Experience
Crafting Stories for Better Design
Whitney Quesenbery
Kevin Brooks
Rosenfeld Media, Brooklyn, New York
Rosenfeld Media, LLC
457 Third Street, #4R
Brooklyn, New York
11215 USA
On the Web: www.rosenfeldmedia.com Please send errors to: errata@rosenfeldmedia.com
Publisher: Louis Rosenfeld
Editor: Marta Justak
Development Editor: David Moldawer
Interior Layout Tech: Danielle Foster
Cover Design: The Heads of State
Indexer: Nancy Guenther
Proofreader: Kezia Endsley
© 2010 Rosenfeld Media, LLC
All Rights Reserved
ISBN: 1-933820-03-9
ISBN-13: 978-1-933820-03-3
LCCN: 2010924283
Printed and bound in the United States of America
Dedication
This book is dedicated to
Brother Blue—Dr. Hugh Morgan Hill
who taught us that our stories have the power to change the world.
How to Use This Book
Who Should Read This Book?
This book is for any user experience practitioner or, really, anyone who designs, whether you are taking your first steps in the field or looking for ways to improve a long practice. If you are curious about storytelling as part of user experience design, we hope this book will give you a nudge to try it out. We've tried to cover the big points, but also to include practical ideas for using stories to enrich your practice and improve your work.
The stories in this book are real stories from real projects, as well as some examples created just for the book. Some are more polished; some are more ad-hoc and raw. There is not one style for the stories. We hope the range in this book will help you find your own storytelling voice.
If you are already a storyteller, this book can show you some new ways to use your storytelling skills.
As we worked on this project, we heard from many people in user experience who were thinking about stories. You will find many of their stories throughout the book as well.
If you...
need to share research and design insights in a compelling and effective way
struggle to communicate the meaning of a large body of data in a way that everyone just "gets"
want to explore a new, innovative idea, and imagine its future
...then this book can help you, by showing you how and when to choose, create, and use stories.
What's in This Book?
The book is organized into three sections:
Section One: The first five chapters are a look at why stories can be useful in user experience and how they work. The section includes a chapter on some of the ethical issues you should consider when you are using stories based on real people.
Section Two. The middle section is an overview of the user experience process, looking at how stories can be a part of all stages of work, from user research to evaluation, including plenty of practical tips and examples.
Section Three. The last six chapters dive into the craft of creating and using stories, looking at how to address the right audience with the right story, the "ingredients" of a story (perspective, character, context, imagery, and language), the framework of structure and plot, and the different mediums you can use in the process of crafting effective stories.
What Comes with This Book?
This book's companion Web site
( rosenfeldmedia.com/books/storytelling) contains more stories and short articles about stories. You can also find a calendar of our workshops, talks about storytelling and storytelling performances, and a place to engage others in conversation. We've also made the book's Story Triangle diagrams and other illustrations available under a Creative Commons license for you to download and include in your own presentations. You can find these on Flickr at www.flickr.com/photos/rosenfeldmedia/sets/, or you can just double-click the pushpin next to the image to see them in high resolution.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why stories in user experience design?
Stories have always been part of user experience design as scenarios, storyboard, flow charts, personas, and every other technique that we use to communicate how (and why) a new design will work. As a part of user experience design, stories serve to ground the work in a real context by connecting design ideas to the people who will use the product. This book starts with a look at how and why stories are so effective. See Chapters 1 and 2.
Is storytelling a new UX methodology?
No. We are not here to promote a new methodology based on using stories. Whether you believe in user-centered design, goals-based design, or even a more technical approach like domain-driven design, stories have a place in your work. Stories can be a part of almost any user experience activity. The middle section of the book is arranged in a loose lifecycle, so you can dive in at whatever point you are in your current projects.
Can I start using stories in the middle of a project?
Yes. Although user experience is improved by having good user research (and the stories you will collect), there are many reasons why you might find yourself working on a design or running a usability evaluation without a good collection of stories to draw on. The chapter on using stories in the design process includes several techniques for working with, or creating, stories. See Chapter 8.
I don't think I tell stories well.
What do I do?
You may not think you tell stories, but you probably already do. Most of us tell stories as a way to explain a perspective on a problem or describe an event. The goal of this book is to help you learn to use stories in a new way. We hope the varied stories in this book will be an inspiration. Your storytelling will improve with each telling opportunity. See Chapter 2.
How do I create a good story?
Creating a story isn't hard. Your first ones may feel awkward, but storytelling gets easier—and your stories get better—with practice. Storytelling is a craft as much as an art. If you start by knowing your audience, add character, perspective, context, and imagery, and put it all together within a structure, it will all come together. See Chapters 11–15.
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
