What UX Designers Can Learn From Storytelling
Great stories are a significant part of human history that has captivated a wide audience for many centuries. They hold a rich depth of meaning, values and internal logic. Here are some insights from creating stories that can help improve your user experience.
There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.
— Ursula K. Leguin
Build a Blueprint
Writers often keep a folder or document of key characters, scenes and backstories in order to manage the variety of moving parts in a novel.
Similarly, your UX process may also require a blueprint of tasks that need to be completed in order to understand the whole context of the user journey.
While personas can help marketers visualize their target audience, they are illustrative at best…Deep insight comes from understanding the entire customer experience (e.g., customer journey mapping) and applying context (e.g., ethnographic studies).
— 2015, Forrester Research
Start by asking the right questions and gathering research or usage data from your users, take note of the moving parts needed for your design to flourish while prioritizing the content and needs of the user. Otherwise, the design may end up a by product of the available software.
Command Attention with the Unexpected
Engagement comes via the unexpected.
Don’t you ever get tired of novels revisiting the same old troupes? Wouldn’t you much rather choose to read a plot where something bizarre and adventurous happens?
While patterns are a foundational for many designs and have many benefits for providing reliability and consistency for expected interactions, I refer to surprise of a well placed micro-interaction or the use of great content writing or interactive icons for a seemingly bland experience, such as filing your taxes.
Do the unexpected to delight and intrigue your audience.
Every ‘What’ has a ‘Why’
Every person’s story has a beginning, middle and an end. A novel is carried by conflict between deep seated ‘Why’s — the motivation behind actions, thoughts and worldview.
Engineers and designers simultaneously know too much and too little. They know too much about the technology and too little about how other people live their live and do their activities.
— Don Norman
Similarly, understanding user needs also requires digging deep into the ‘Why’. Beyond asking ‘what’ is the user’s goal and ‘how’ your team can achieve it technically, consider the ‘Why’s.
- Why do they want something to happen?
- Why do they expect it to happen?
- Why is this goal important to them?
Without a concrete understanding of ‘Why’ something matters, we spiral off into random directions, becoming bloated with features or fixated on narrow use cases.
A principle we should strive to hold onto is to create useful, user centered products and go forth from there.
