When we say that the design must “tell a story,” we are not just
talking about games or interactive fiction, or even about turning a
work application into an adventure (“Conquer the benefits allocation
maze…”). Instead, we mean the kind of stories that help you create new
designs. These stories are used to make you think of new possibilities,
give you the tools to encourage a self-reflective kind of
thinking—design thinking—or so you can imagine designs that will
improve the lives of other people. Stories explore ideas from user
research.
This article is an excerpt of Rosenfeld Media's latest book 'Storytelling For User Experience'
In Tom Erickson’s
view, design is as much about communication as it is about the end
result. This includes communication with the eventual users, as well as
communication among a collaborative team. The stories are a tool to
help designers “grapple with the messy, ill-defined issues” that are
part of the design process. They do this by not only creating small
scenarios, but also by communicating the emotional overtones, the
social and organizational dynamics that are just as much a part of the
story as the factual narrative. Used in this way, stories activate the
mind by providing rough sketches with openings for discussion.
Imagine that you have been researching attitudes toward new “green
technologies” as you work on a product to help people use resources
more wisely. You might have heard people talking about how difficult it
was to tell how much electricity or water they were really using. And
you probably heard attitudes ranging from the altruistic (“We should
use fewer resources for the good of the earth.”) to the selfish (“Why
should I be the one to scrimp?”). You probably have a few story
fragments. But you still need to turn this information into a design.
That process might involve sketching ideas for screens as Jeremie Jean
and Aaron Marcus did in “The Green Machine: Going Green at Home” (in
UPA’s UX Magazine 8.4) when they imagined a smart phone application
that would help people visualize their energy use by showing a graph
that compared their goal to average use by others. Or you might create
a story showing how your design idea would work.
Purple Buildings
Tom
Erickson’s story describes a design solution to the problem of how one
might use monitoring of resources to encourage people to moderate their
usage habits while at the same time not having a Big Brother scenario
where every toilet flush is metered and reported to the utility.
Xiang-Wei left the transit station and turned onto her
street with foreboding in her heart. She looked down the street, and
her fears were confirmed: Her building’s skin, normally a healthy
green, was discolored with purple streaks. How embarrassing–their
building was overdrawn on its water allotment.
It wasn’t her fault. That morning, alerted by feedback in
their apartment, she and her husband had skipped their showers and made
certain that their children used no more than their 10-liter allotments.
But it was difficult to believe that their building-mates
were to blame. She’d gotten to know the 24 other families that lived in
the co-op over the last two years, and they were all generally
responsible. Her husband thought that there was a leak somewhere in the
building. That seemed unlikely to her because most appliances monitored
their resource usage and sent out requests for assistance when
out-of-band consumption events occurred. But her husband said not
everything was instrumented–pipes for example–and that there could well
be a leak, especially since they’d had a mild earth tremor last week.
Old Dr. Lee, who lived just down the hall, spoke darkly of hackers,
implying that vague enemies had broken into the resource monitoring
system with the aim of embarrassing them. But Dr. Lee was well known to
be a bit…odd and, besides, the penalties for hacking into resource
control systems were severe.
Xiang-Wei reached her building, and hurried up the walk
through the front garden, feeling her cheeks color. Fortunately, she
had come home early, and there weren’t many people on the street, but
still…
There was just one thing to do: organize a vote of the co-op
to ask the resource authorities to turn on fine-grained monitoring.
That would enable them to identify any leaks, or to put the finger on
the miscreant who was wasting resources.
Not all new design stories have to be as big as a building. Stories
can illustrate designs that solve smaller problems as well. No matter
how big or small the idea, one type of design story takes a point of
pain and transforms it into a successful, happy ending. As an example,
here are some short story fragments from users of a payroll program:
- “My co-worker usually does the payroll. When she’s on vacation,
we always have to scramble to get everything done right and get the
staff paid on time.”
- “It’s not the routine things that are a problem. It’s special stuff like bonuses and advances.”
- “The instructions in our software are fine, but they don’t
include little details like which set of checks we should use for
payroll. We all dug through our wallets looking for a stub so we could
see which number series to use.”
Maybe you used these fragments in a short story to illustrate the problems and frustrations:
- “Mary was filling in on payroll while the office manager,
Kathy, was away. On Thursday, just as she was about to run the payroll
checks, she remembered Kathy telling her about some special bonus
checks due that week. She groaned. Special checks…special anything
always seemed to go wrong for her. If she could just remember what
Kathy said. She stared at the confusing mass of notes pinned up on the
wall behind the accounting computer. None of them said anything about
bonuses. She groaned again. Last time she got something wrong, it took
weeks to clean up the problems.”
Now you can think about how this story could end differently and
write a new story that changes the pain into delight with a new feature
for the payroll software.
- “Mary was filling in on payroll while the office manager,
Kathy, was away. She didn’t like this part of the job—ever since she’d
made a mistake that took weeks to clean up. But Kathy told her not to
worry this time and when Mary clicked on “Weekly Payroll” she saw why.
All the information she needed was right there on the screen. Instead
of the confusing grid of numbers that had caused all the problems last
time, she saw step-by-step instructions built into the forms. Best of
all, Kathy had obviously written some of the instructions, because they
described the procedures in their own office, like the note that told
her which way to put the checks in the printer. But the best was the
reminder of the special bonuses due this week. Everything was set up,
and all she had to do was click.”
A short story like this not only suggests new features, but connects
them to the user research and the people who will benefit from them.
Stories evolve through the design process
During the design process, your use of stories will evolve as the
design goes through brainstorming (generative), concept (expressive),
and specification (prescriptive) stages. As the design progresses, your
stories will too, changing format and adding detail.
The number of people working with the stories expands as you move
from analysis to design. In the early stages of user research, the user
experience team was working most directly with the stories. Now, as you
move into the design phase, more people are involved. People who were
not involved in the user research (or were only involved in some parts
of it) will begin to work with what you have learned and with the
stories you have collected and selected.
How your company or project is organized will also make a
difference. If you have a strong user experience team, your experience
with using stories will be different than if you are the lone voice of
user experience on a more traditional technical development team.
Brainstorming for new stories: Generative stories
In a good user experience design process, you will move into the
design phase with a collection of stories to work with. But this may
not always be the case. You may find yourself in the midst of the
design process without having done user research and without the
stories you find during that work.
This does not mean that you don’t have any story ideas to draw on.
But those stories will come from your own past experiences and
assumptions about the product and its users. Your own history and even
the language you use to think about the design challenge can be a trap,
preventing you from seeing the large quantities of creative fodder
around you.
While brainstorming is a technique that’s been around for a long
time and is practiced widely, it is not always as productive as you
would like. While it is good to collect all the wild and crazy ideas a
team might have, what might be more useful is to have a sort of
“brainstorming helper,” something that can trigger creative ideas—or at
least ideas that are different and new for the team.
If you are starting to work with stories for the first time at the
design stage, you can use brainstorming games to generate some new
stories.
Even engineering PhDs can play games
Early
in my career, I had to travel to a meeting of researchers and research
managers for an idea generation session on a particular area of
technology. These “ideation sessions∫ were popular because they
appeared to generate a lot of ideas off the top of all the
participants’ heads on the chosen topic of the day. They were sessions
with a lot of talking (though not a lot of listening), and the primary
goal as far as I could tell was to generate patentable ideas, with a
secondary goal of generating ideas that could become products.
A day or two before I was to leave for the meeting, my
manager let me know that I would be leading a part of this meeting, and
that our director would be in attendance. I calmly responded to him,
™Sure–ok,∫ as my panic ensued. What was I going to do with a room full
of engineering PhDs? I was sure that my boss wanted to test this whole
storytelling thing I often talked about. But at that time, I primarily
had writing and performance experience, and little experience teaching
and leading workshops.
What I did was use a game that I saw a friend use, which she
got from Doug Lipman’s bok Storytelling Games. I adapted a game
designed for sixth graders to work for research PhDs, and prayed I
wouldn’t lose my job. I had them pair up and play a game similar to Mad
Libs. The objective was to choose from a list of sentence structures
with blanks and fill in those blanks by choosing words from a set of
word categories, all related to design and to the technology topic of
the day. Once they had filled in a sentence with the appropriate words,
the story supporting that sentence should leap out at them. All they
had to do was write down that supporting story.
Each researcher pair was given 15 minutes to go off and
write their little story and then come back to share their stories with
the group.
“You mean you want us to pick words and write stories?”
There was a certain level of skepticism in the room. During those 15
minutes while they were writing, I was weighing job options. Surely, I
would be busted for making a room full of doctors play a childish game.
When the time was up, I checked with the pairs, and they all
requested another five minutes. After that I checked again, and again
they asked for more timeºand again once more. At that point, I could
feel the warmth of job security flowing back into my life.
When the group finally reassembled, we only had 45 minutes
of scheduled meeting time left to share stories. When we were still
sitting there two hours later sharing stories and identifying all the
interface and technology ideas they had triggered, I knew we had
something.
Stories can be tough to just come up with, but they can be triggered
easily. Remember, we are storytelling beings. It doesn’t take much to
trigger a story. A simple story fragment will do.
Brainstorming helper: The storytelling game
This is a version of Doug Lipman’s game, adapted for user experience brainstorming.
- Choose one of the story sentences;
- Choose a set of items from the People, Places, Activities, and
Motivations columns to fill in the blanks in the story sentence. Modify
the phrases so that they make grammatical sense for the sentence;
- Once the sentence is completed, write a short story to provide context for that sentence.
A good story sentence will have at least one person, place, motivation, and activity. The simplest story sentence is:
- A (person) in (place) needs help doing (activity) because (motivation).
You can use details that are appropriate for your company to make
more complex story sentences. For example, these sentences are for
constructing stories about mobile communication and computing.
- While a (person) is in (place), they need to find and meet up with a (person) because (motivation).
- A (person) who is trying to (motivation) at (place) must prepare for (activity), which they will have to do in one hour.
- A (person) at (place) just realized that they lost their keys and wallet while (activity) and needs to rearrange… everything.
The options for these categories should reflect the full range of
possibilities—and even some that might seem a bit over the top. When
you make your own list for a project, be sure to include some wild
examples. If you are working with ideas suggested by your user
research, be sure to include some of the less frequent types of users.
If you stick to your current categories, you end up with the same old
thing. But keep the descriptions short and easy to understand. You want
broad categories, not finely drawn differences. The idea here is to
free you up to think in new ways.
table 8.1
Table 8.1 has a list of options in each of the categories.
Here are a few of the story sentences filled with words from this list:
- A small business owner in a foreign country is trying to pay household bills to stay sane.
- A spy in an airport needs help feeling secure about her children when she is not at home.
- While a student is at the beach, he needs to find and meet up with a supermodel because he wants to improve his social life.
- A nun at a baseball stadium just realized that she lost her keys
and wallet while spending her Saturday chauffeuring kids between
activities, and she needs to rearrange… everything.
Your combinations can be fanciful, or you can choose ones that seem
to make more sense. Don’t be afraid to get more outlandish because you
can explain anything in a story. But don’t pick sentences that just
tell the same story you already know. Remember, the point of this
exercise is to get creative in how you think about the design challenge.
The story begins with the completed sentence and creates a narrative
about how the person completed the activity. To suit the needs of
different types of groups and personalities, here are two methods of
doing this exercise.
Raw brainstorming. Generate lots of stories for different sentences
very quickly. Don’t worry about the details. Just do them rapidly and
without judgment. The idea is to generate many stories that might be
the germ of a new idea. The method should work particularly well with
groups able to loosen up and let their brains throw out ideas without
the need to fix each one first.
Pick one sentence and stick with it. Develop the best story for one
sentence. This method works well with groups that like to dive deep
into ideas. While they may not benefit from a wide variety of ideas, as
in the first method, they will take comfort in an idea that is rich by
design.
You can even use both methods. Start with the first one to generate
a lot of ideas. Then select a few for the more detailed presentation in
the second.
Different work styles need different story styles
I
was once paired with a young engineer in a technology brainstorming
workshop. We were supposed to pick from two lists of unrelated words
and use the combination of these words as sparks for generating new
ideas. We were given about 30 minutes to run down the long word list
and generate as many ideas as possible. Fun for me! “What better way to
spend a half hour,” I said.
But my partner needed to work more deliberately, grounding
each piece of any idea in a technology already familiar to him. Nothing
could go unanswered. Mystery was not allowed. We were not even close to
fast or innovative. I kept trying to push us on–he kept wanting to
ruminate. At the end of 30 minutes, we had only a few ideas completed
while the other groups had 10, 15, even 20. I was frustrated.
When I thought about the experience, I realized that our
different approaches gave us the worst of both worlds. If he were more
like me, we would have had a lot of ideas, some of them really good.
But if I were more like him, we would have had a few, well-developed
ideas with deep roots in computer science, mechanical engineering,
manufacturing, perhaps even product marketing. We would have fully
solved some stuff. Instead, because we each had different approaches,
we had a small collection of mish-mash ideas.
No one approach is better. While it’s really good to have a lot of
ideas to work with, some people just can’t let go of how they naturally
think. You’ll have to judge whom you are working with and adjust
appropriately, because much as we might wish to, we can’t always make
other people change.
Don’t worry about wasting time. The whole idea of brainstorming is
to create a lot of ideas so you have a rich mix of stories to work
from. Brave New Workshop, an improvisational comedy group, comes up
with 600 ideas to create a show with 25 sketches. In fact, they don’t
start refining any of their ideas until they have created all 600 of
their one-sentence ideas. Story sentences generated quickly work in the
same way, loosening you up by generating a lot of quick sketches.
You’ll throw most of them away, but some will spark ideas that can grow.
Here’s an example of how one of the brainstorming story sentences
might grow into a larger story and begin to explore the context to
expose possible design concepts.
A generative story
Story sentence: A nun at a baseball stadium
just realized that she has lost her keys and wallet while spending her
Saturday chauffeuring kids between activities, so she needs to
rearrange everything.
The story: It had been a hectic morning for
Sister Sarah. She had picked up three kids at each of their homes,
taken them to the teen empowerment meeting downtown, and then ushered
them off to the afternoon Phillies game. When she discovered her wallet
and keys were missing, she didn’t know where she could have lost them.
In the parking lot? In the stadium? In the car? On the ground? Who
knows?
Fortunately, she had kept her 4G mobile in an inside pocket of
her habit–the pocket without the hole in it. She was able to use the
bank application to lock her savings account against any future
activity, knowing she would eventually have to go into the bank
personally to have it unlocked.
She was worried about her car keys. If someone found them on the
ground and figured out which car they belonged to, she would lose all
the children’s art she kept in her trunk.
From previous bad experiences, she had learned to use her mobile phone
to save the GPS location of her parking space in the massive stadium
parking lot. So when she went to the stadium security office, she was
able to tell them exactly where the car was. Very quickly the call came
back from the parking lot that her keys had been found a couple of rows
away from her car.
This story suggests several possible concepts for new products, ready for further consideration:
- A mobile application for parking lots that records the location of a car on the parking lot grid;
- A mobile banking application that allows users to do an emergency account lock;
- A device attached to a key ring that can reply to a mobile signal with its location.
Hearing this story, an engineer or business development person may respond with these ideas:
- We could trigger the car alarm from the mobile to help find a parked car easier;
- If the mobile could unlock and start her car, she wouldn’t need to carry car keys;
- An RFID tag on the phone could be made to work with ATMs so she could always get money if she lost her wallet.
Interested in more?
This was just a short excerpt from Rosenfeld Media’s latest book ‘Storytelling for User Experience‘. If you want the entire experience: go get the book at our UX Book Store. You can also win a copy.
