Crafting Stories for Better Design
We all use stories to communicate, explore, persuade, and inspire. In user experience, stories help us to understand our users, learn about their goals, explain our research, and demonstrate our design ideas. In this book, Quesenbery and Brooks teach you how to craft and tell your own unique stories to improve your designs.
Whitney Quesenbery combines a fascination with people and an obsession to communicate clearly with her goal of bringing user research insights to designing products where people matter.
Her first two books—Storytelling for User Experience: Crafting Stories for Better Design (with Kevin Brooks for Rosenfeld Media) and Global UX: Design and research in a connected world (with Daniel Szuc)—help practitioners keep users in mind throughout the creative process.
She’s also passionate about civic design. As co-director of the non-profit Center for Civic Design with Dana Chisnell, she works with election officials on usability and design of ballots and other election materials. They publish the popular Field Guides to Ensuring Voter Intent, which provide researched guidelines in a handy pocket format. Their work is funded by the MacArthur Foundation, the James Irvine Foundation, and the National Science Foundation.
Whitney Quesenbery is a co-author of two influential Brennan Center reports that show just how much design matters in elections. From 2004 to 2009 she was chair for Human Factors and Privacy for the Elections Assistance Commission’s committee developing voting system guidelines.
Her interest in accessibility and civic design came together when she served as UPA’s representative on the Access Board’s advisory committee, drafting updates for the U.S. “Section 508” accessibility regulations. She managed an EAC grant for accessible voting technology that brought together researchers and election officials in a dozen projects, including the influential Anywhere Ballot and an OpenIDEO design challenge.
Whitney has been part of events and publications around the world, including World Usability Day, User Friendly, Fluxible, Agile, UXPA, STC, SIG-CHI, CSUN, AccessU, Web Accessibility Initiative research symposia, PlainTalk, UX Australia, the Accessibility Summit, and has given testimony for the Presidential Commission on Election Administration.
Before she was seduced by a little beige computer into software, usability, and interface design, Whitney was a theatrical lighting designer on and off Broadway, learning about storytelling from some of the masters.
Read MoreStorytelling has always been a critical part of human communication. And, it has often played some part in designing human-computer systems. As the scope of human computer systems continues to increase to new form factors, social contexts, and cultures, storytelling techniques are becoming ever more important throughout the design and development process. In Storytelling for User Experience, the authors present the User Experience practitioner a wide range of useful techniques and advice about storytelling. The book is liberally sprinkled with material taken from real world cases both from their own experience and from that of other practitioners. It is quite readable and should prove extremely valuable for anyone interested in making products that are actually useful and usable.
John C Thomas, Ph.D., IBM T. J. Watson Research Center
Stories facilitate a level of communication that is as close to telepathy as you can get. Kevin and Whitney guide you to use storytelling in `how to’ scenarios so smoothly that you may never realize how far you leapfrogged ahead and never know the mistakes you didn’t make because of this book. It’s that good.
Annette Simmons, author of The Story Factor
For more than two decades I’ve taught that usability is the key to creating an accessible user experience for people with disabilities. However, Whitney and Kevin have opened my eyes to the incredible power of storytelling; how communicating user needs combined with empathic listening is the bridge that closes the gap between software design and accessibility. Storytelling creates the light bulb moment that says, `Ahhh…Now I understand.’ And that is what everyone wants—to be understood.
Mike Paciello, The Paciello Group
A very practical, readable survey of ways to use one of the world’s oldest and most powerful transmedia forms—storytelling—to increase the coherence and effectiveness of digital artifacts. Brooks and Quesenbery offer concrete strategies for creating a richer design process and more successful user experiences.
Janet Murray, Director of Graduate Studies, Digital Media M.S./Ph.D. Program, Georgia Tech
Storytelling is as old as humanity. We seem to have forgotten this communication art, its wisdom, and its pleasure, in an era of action-movies with mindless superheroes and heroines. Quesenbery and Brooks help us to remember the power of effective and affective storytelling in all phases of product/service development, from research and analysis, to design and evaluation. All the roads of storytelling lead to better understanding of oneself, of users, of stakeholders in the success of the user experience. This useful and innovative book treats the key components of good storytelling in developing user experiences and provides smart, focused advice for putting techniques into practice.
Aaron Marcus, President, Aaron Marcus and Associates,Inc. and Editor-in-Chief Emeritus, User Experience
This book fills a gap that I didn’t know existed until I read it! Clearly, we are engaged in story telling as part of exploring, understanding, and bringing alive the user and the user’s experience. With this book, we can now add, if we aren’t doing this already, this tool to our UX toolkit. Going beyond the concept of personas and use cases, storytelling, as the authors illustrate so well in the book, can be applied to any part of the design and development of the product: from conception through birth and beyond.
Carol M. Barnum, Director, Usability Center and Director, Graduate programs in Information Design and Communication, Southern Polytechnic State University
I have been tantalized by the power of the story to impact so many facets of the user experience process. The arrival of this thoughtful, actionable, and wide-ranging book is a glorious day!
Steve Portigal, Principal, Portigal Consulting
Whitney and Kevin clearly articulate the power and effectiveness of storytelling for understanding users and communicating their real experiences to all project stakeholders. Their guidelines for integrating storytelling into user research and design have already given me new ways to help my clients better know their users and deliver great products and services. This is a reference I will be reaching for regularly.
Karen Bachmann, Partner, Seascape Consulting
The user’s experience is not confined to a single point in time, but is built up over many moments and contexts. Designers must be able to explore this continuum, and return with information that helps design teams, and entire organisations, build better products and services. Most of us know the power of the story, but we may not appreciate how applicable story-telling can be to the work of the designer—in understanding users, communicating with business stakeholders, and in envisioning and creating. This book discusses how and when you can use stories, as well as the mechanics of story-telling, with plenty of examples. The authors do not advocate any particular design methodology, but show how you can enhance your current toolkit by thinking more deeply about stories and their application. In recent years we’ve moved far from the desktop paradigm that defined our design thinking in many ways. Many designers have embraced elements of ethnographic study, conducting field trips and creating scenarios and personas. In effect, we’ve become story-tellers, but often without realising or acknowledging this fact. One of the great benefits of this book is that it helps us become more analytical and more organised, hence more effective, in our approach to storytelling. Read this book, and put the power of the story to work for your projects.
Gerry Gaffney, Director of Information & Design (www.infodesign.com.au) and producer of the User Experience podcast (www.uxpod.com)
These common questions about storytelling and their short answers are taken from Kevin Brooks & Whitney Quesenbery’s book Storytelling for User Experience. You can find longer answers to each in your copy of the book, either printed or digital version.
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
Have fun!
—Ginny Redish, www.redish.net
Every book takes a village and, like authors everywhere, we have a lot of people to thank. In this case, the village includes the people who contributed stories to the book and the many people who allowed us to pick their brains about different ways to use stories.
Ginny Redish gets special thanks. Not only did she agree to write the wonderful foreword, but she was also there from beginning to end, with moral support and helping us shape the book.
A lot of people read the book at various stages. Their comments were enormously helpful: Mary Beth Rettger, Caroline Jarrett, Daniel Szuc, Karen Bachmann, Ben Weems, Ryan Evans, Laura Packer, Jo Radner, and Steve Krug.
Dirk Knemeyer and Juhan Sohin at Involution Studios in Boston took a flyer on us and hosted the first “Sex, Money, and Storytelling” workshop.
We learned a lot from the great group of people as we blended some of our material for the first time. We met Calvin Chan at User Friendly in Shanghai and convinced him to create the cartoons that introduce our stories and the storyteller people that populate the book.
And, of course, Lou Rosenfeld himself and our editors Marta Justak and David Moldawer.
From Whitney
The first time I talked about storytelling in public, I was pretty nervous. Debi Parush, Karen Bachmann, and Basil White sat up with me the night before while I ripped up and rewrote the whole presentation. The next morning, I arrived to find a room full of people and Caroline Jarrett sitting in front, notepad at the ready. Terrifying. But as the session went on, I began to see this just might work. So, thanks to everyone who got up at8:30 a.m. and stuck with me while I felt my way through.
Thank you to John Chester, my ever-patient husband, who kept everything running and listened any time I needed to talk.
To everyone on every project I’ve ever worked on.
To my mother, who taught me to read and to love a good book.
And to my father, who set the bar high and drummed into me that “if you can’t think, you can’t write.”
From Kevin
Physically writing a book is not hard; it just takes time and patience.
Envisioning writing a book, that is, putting the idea in one’s mind and keeping it there through all the ups and downs of the process, fighting to hold it there against all of life’s competing attention attractors, is more than just hard—it’s somewhat miraculous. Fortunately, miracles happen with help.
I want to thank the storytelling community for their talent and support, and all those people who sat through my workshops, helping me hone the thing that I love into concepts I can communicate.
To Laura Packer, my partner in art and life, who has laughed with me in support through all those ups and downs.
Thank you to my children, Cara, Kristoff, and Stephan, who inspire me, and to my mother who has been the teller and subject of many of my stories over the years.
And to Brother Blue, my spiritual father, who opened the door and showed me what it means to live the life of a storyteller.
