Storytelling for User Experience

Strategy

Stories are an effective way to collect, analyze and share qualitative information from user research, spark design imagination and help make design ideas compelling. We all tell stories all the time, but to craft a story for a particular audience, for a particular reason and effect, requires some instruction and modeling, a reasonable amount of practice, and a lot of listening.

Storytelling might help you:

• Make user research data more compelling by adding the rich details of stories to your reports, personas and presentations.
• Put a design idea in context, showing how it makes an emotional connection or fills a need, exploring it from different perspectives.
• Help a product team really understand a point of pain, or show how a new approach could remove barriers.
• Sell an idea more effectively by engaging your listeners, allowing them to imagine the ideas for themselves.

Bring your own UX story material to develop safe atmosphere of constructive critique. You will learn the mechanics of oral and written presentation through instruction, modeling and practice. Exercises will let you try out different storytelling elements such as imagery, different story structures and telling stories in different contexts. You will experiment with structures and styles for different ways you might use stories in your work.

People who know they have a good UX story waiting to be told!

During this workshop you will:

• Understand why stories are a natural part of user experience work.
• Learn where stories fit into a UX process to add stories to your own user experience practice.
• Know the elements of a story – structure, plot, imagery, context - and how they can be used to craft better stories.
• Have practices telling a story in several different ways, exploring how to adapt it to different contexts.

Attendees will leave with a story crafting kit to use as inspiration for their next story (and the one after that).