Stories are the human experience - 4 July 2006

Read this article in Chinese (translated by Lu Zhang, proofread by Christina Li)

“Every time we create a scenario or a short anecdote to imagine how our persona might interact with our product, we are creating stories that show the persona in action and help us understand them, and how to design for them, better. ”
– from “Storytelling and Narrative” in The Personas Lifecycle

Usability through storytelling, the theme for the UPA 2006 conference, was examined from many angles. Presenters looked at how stories fit into our work, throughout the entire user-centered design process.

• During user research, we collect stories from individuals. These snapshots from many different people help us understand the variety of their experiences, so we can design for them more effectively.
• Personas provide a way to create a usable view of data from many different sources. In writing the narratives and scenarios that are part of most personas, we create characters make user research easy to access.
• As part of the analysis process, we create narratives from scenarios to use cases that explore how specific goals can be accomplished. In doing so, we describe the experience of using the product, exploring not just the what buttons are clicked or menus selected, but the entire experience.
• Usability test reporting is also a kind of storytelling, as we find ways to communicate what we have seen while observing people work with a product or prototype.

All of these are useful perspectives, good examples of our roles in communicating and making use of user research and usability insights. But the importance of storytelling goes beyond these examples. It is the key to seeing the user experience in a holistic way, and to designing for that experience. This is because stories are not something added to the human experience, they are the human experience!

Storytelling is as old as human culture

“Stories fill our lives in the way water fills the lives of fish. Stories are so all-pervasive that we practically cease to be aware of them”
– Steve Denning

Stories are a way of communicating that goes back to before recorded history–and are just as important in modern culture. They are how we put information into a memorable and compelling form. Every culture has its stories–some say that a culture is a group of people who share a common set of stories about who they are and how they live.

Storytelling may also be based in human neuro-biology. The saying that “seeing is believing” suggests that we can believe best what we can experience with our own senses. But the physical structure of our eye includes a blind spot. This is a place at the back of the eye where the optic nerve connects to the brain. At this location, there are no photoreceptors, so no information about the part of the world that maps to this location gets to the brain. The surprising thing is that this is not a tiny little spot, but a pretty big blind spot. We are not aware of it because our brains fill in the missing part of reality for us–it creates a constant visual story to fill in the missing details.

Author’s note: To read more about the blind spot, and try and experiment so you can see it for yourself, see Professor Paul Grobstein’s description on Serendip.

Another important thing about storytelling is that it creates a connection between the teller and the listener (or reader). It’s the difference between practicing a presentation in an empty room and talking to an actual audience. Stories are a two-way communication channel.

When we think about storytelling as part of designing the user experience, we are tapping into a natural form of human communication that engages many levels of perception at once. In his keynote at UPA 2006, Steve Denning talked about using stories in business to help create change. Because stories engage the imagination, they have the power to draw listeners in, understanding the current situation, and then imagining a new solution to its problems.

Personas embody stories

In current usability practice, personas are one of the most direct ways to incorporate stories into our work. In fact, the real power of personas is that they allow us to tell stories to share research and design insights.

In The Social Life of Information, John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid showed the value of stories in sharing knowledge through the example of Xerox repair technicians. They shared solutions to difficult problems through the “war stories” they told at informal gatherings.

In a similar way, personas provide a way to tell stories that illustrate a wide variety of experiences. *Although personas are created from deep research, they help the team focus on specific people, no broad demographics. Paradoxically, limiting choices by focusing on a set of personas can help clarify design decisions. *Personas help organize user data from many different sources, including both qualitative and quantitative research. But the more research we have, the fewer people will read all of it. The personas’ stories illustrate important research findings and create a coherent analysis.

• Stories are a natural way to understand people and events, so personas build empathy and engagement with real users. By putting a face on “users”, personas help the team design for people, rather than drifting into the habit of designing for themselves.

When used as a way to tell stories, to put facts into a context, personas make them easier to remember and providing a more vivid picture of what those facts mean. In doing so, they improve user-centered design.

More reading

Many presentations from UPA 2006: Usability Through Storytelling, and links to speaker resources are available on the UPA web site.

You can read more about Paul Grobstein’s work on perception in his 2002 talk at UPA The Brain’s Images: Co-Constructing Reality and Self.

My chapter on Storytelling and Narrative is in The Persona Lifecycle by John Pruitt and Tamara Adlin (Morgan Kauffman, 2006).

You can find more of my work on storytelling in user-centered design on my web site.

Whitney Quesenbery is a user researcher, user experience practitioner, and usability expert with a passion for clear communication. She has been in the field since 1989, helping companies from The Open University to the National Cancer Institute develop usable web sites and applications. Before she was seduced by a little beige computer, Whitney was a theatrical lighting designer on and off Broadway, learning about storytelling from some of the masters. These lessons stay with her in creating user experiences and telling user stories. She can be found at www.WQusability.com.

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