Recommended
Recommended
More Related Content
Recently uploaded
Recently uploaded (20)
Featured
Featured (20)
Telling stories ltux london presentation 20181127
- 1. Telling stories Why Narrative Matters to UX David Drysdale http://www.mobydiction.ca https://www.linkedin.com/in/djdrysdale
- 2. Mr Vogt It makes people uncomfortable when computers act like they are humans. “ Hi! Any questions about pricing? I’m here to help. 😬
- 3. One day, I'll put my resume up on this page… Maybe I'll land a cool job with computers somewhere.... :-) — me, ca. 1996 “
- 4. • What is storytelling? • What stories do we tell about our users? • What stories do we tell to our users?
- 7. –Douglas Merrill Stories have everything that facts wish they had but never will: colour, action, characters, sites, smells, sounds, emotions—stuff that we can easily relate to. “
- 8. Not a chemist, either.
- 11. Rockwell Kent’s illustrations, not mine.
- 13. Rockwell Kent’s illustrations, not mine.
- 14. What stories do we tell about our users?
- 15. Quote: “I’d strike the sun if it insulted me.” Ahab Age: 58 Occupation: Captain Home: Nantucket Seaworthiness Monomania Vengefulness Tech Literacy Goals: Destroy Moby Dick Frustrations: Can’t find Moby Dick Behaviours: Stomping around the deck of the ship at night; soliloquizing
- 17. –Kim Goodwin Personas without scenarios are like characters with no plot. “
- 18. “As a captain of a whaling ship, I want to know the whereabouts of one specific whale so that I can satisfy my desire for vengeance.”
- 20. What stories do we tell to our users?
- 22. Call me Ishmael. Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.
- 23. Need to know Nice to know
- 26. Get a Quote Term 10 Life Insurance Flexible, affordable life insurance Swiped from an actual competitor website
- 28. Get a Quote Term 10 Life Insurance Flexible, affordable life insurance Swiped from an actual competitor website
- 31. Be mindful.
- 32. Work together.
Editor's Notes
- Hello, welcome everyone. Thanks for coming out, and thanks to Ladies that UX, and especially Donna and Meaghan, for organizing this and giving me this opportunity. My name’s Dave, and I’m a digital strategist who also does some writing and content work on the side.
- This is a talk about telling stories, so I want to start with one. I was in grade ten, taking computer science and we were learning Turbo Pascal, or maybe Hypercard. Anyway, I wrote a program that had what today we would call a conversational interface. When my teacher reviewed it, though, he warned me that “it makes people uncomfortable when computers talk to them like they are humans.” Now, this was something I had never even thought about before—that the way I wrote my code, the way I presented an interaction, could have an impact on the way the person using the program felt. So it was probably the first ever conversation I had about user experience. I want to share that because sometimes when I attend these kinds of events I feel like a bit of an impostor. I mean, I am not trained as a designer. And while I know a bit of HTML, CSS, I’ve dabbled in making a couple of web apps for fun, I wouldn’t call myself a coder. No, my background is English Literature. When I left high school I debated between studying English and Computer Science at university and decided on English I think probably because there was less math involved. And then I stuck with it, eventually doing a masters and a PhD in English Literature. And when people find that out, they’re often surprised or confused about how I ended up working on websites and other digital stuff.
- But really, working in UX as I do feels a bit like coming full circle, because in many ways I’ve been thinking about websites and the Internet for over 20 years now, off and on. So to elicit your sympathy, here’s a website I made back in tenth grade; I know it’s not the first one I ever did because it has that sidebar but it’s not done with frames. It’s a bit cringey today—I don’t know why I thought anybody could read that dark blue on black text—but for a long time I’ve thought a lot about how websites are mechanisms for sharing information, for educating people, for helping people solve problems. Even if nobody ever showed up for the nightly “bass chat.” But any rate, this is all to say that my perspective on UX is heavily informed by the fact that the bulk of my training isn’t in design or development so much as it is in stories: thinking about how they work, thinking about how we tell stories effectively, how people read stories. And what I want to do today is hopefully share with you a bit of that perspective in hopes that you’ll think a bit more about the stories you’re telling to and about the people who interact with what you design and build.
- So my talk really has three sections. First of all, I want to talk a bit about what storytelling is, and why it’s powerful, and also clear up a few terms I’m going to be using like storytelling and narrative. Second, I want to talk about the stories we tell about our users, and our responsibilities in terms of the narratives we construct around them. Third, I want to look at how that can translate into the stories we tell to our users, and just offer some suggestions around how we can tell better stories.
- So, stories. I get that on one hand, stories and UX might seem like a bit of an odd mix. In fact, there are often cases when we’re suspicious of storytelling. Sometimes it feels more like what marketing does, right? They come in and put their spin on something to try to convince the user to do something, where as we, as UXers, want to help people solve problems. But at the same time, I think if we want to talk about being empathetic to our users, to being truly human-centric designers and creators, that means understanding a bit about what story is and how it works. Because, as human beings, we’re wired for stories.
- Stories, it turns out, are a remarkably effective at communicating a lot of information that’s difficult to communicate otherwise. We don’t think in facts; we think in stories. And I’m going to borrow some neuroscience here, which is not something I have a lot of expertise in, but I think I understand this much. If you present somebody with a basic list of facts, just data points discrete pieces of information, they process it with two parts of their brain that are associated with understanding language. But, when we are told a story, other parts of our brain start to light up, too—those associated with sensory processing. When we hear a story, our brain reacts as though it is actually experiencing the sensations that are being described in that story. The brain, it turns out, doesn’t distinguish all that much between reading about an experience, and encountering it in real life.
- Stories convey much more information than a list of facts can—colour, action, characters, sites, smells, sounds emotion. They are extremely information dense. Keith Oatley, who is a professor of cognitive psychology at U of T, describes reading as a simulation of reality that “runs on minds of readers just as computer simulations run on computers.” Hearing a story literally creates augmented reality, no technology required. And stories also help us make stronger connections with other individuals. A meta analysis of 86 fMRI studies showed that there’s substantial overlap between the brain networks used to understand stories, and those used to navigate interactions with other individuals.
- And stories help us cultivate trust, too. This is oxytocin, also known as “the love hormone,” a chemical in our brain linked with trust. Oxytocin is released by our brain when there is physical contact between two individuals, such as a hug, but also in response to an act of kindness, and also through listening to emotional stories.
- I think this is worth thinking about. As UXers, one of our core tenets of belief is that user experience should encompass the entirety of a user’s response to an interaction—it’s the total experience. And that includes not just usability, or convenience, efficiency, but that entire emotional response. And stories can be a big part of that.
- So what is a story, anyway? When I see people talk about storytelling, there’s usually some version of this diagram, which is a pretty common, basic, story structure. You have a character or protagonist or user, sure, who has a problem. They realize they have a problem. And they commit to solving it. There are struggles on the way. And, in the story, the tension rises as they continue to wrestle with the problem until they reach a crisis point and a climax. Throughout this, the character is undergoing a transformation, and that climax is the moment that seals the transformation: they have a new perspective brought about through their struggles, and then, depending on the story, the status quo is restored or else a new order is established. Mind you, if telling stories was this simple, everyone and their dog would have a novel out. But things aren’t so simple. This is only part of the story. The /way/ we tell the story is just as, if not more important.
- I hope you will indulge me if, to illustrate this point, I pick a story that I’ve spent a good chunk of my life thinking about. The truth is that this talk originated from an off-hand comment I made to Brian Frank about wanting to write something about the User Experience of Moby-Dick. And so this is that conversation’s vestigial tale (vestigial tail). Now, if you’re not familiar with Moby-Dick, the basics of the plot are very simple. There’s a guy—call him Ishmael—who is feeling kind of out of sorts, so he decides to go see the world and gets a job on board a whaling ship. Turns out that the captain of the ship, Ahab, is a bit crazy and obsessed with hunting one specific whale, a white whale called Moby Dick. Moby Dick took his leg years ago, you see, and Ahab wants revenge. They chase the wheel around the world, and eventually find him. There’s a chase that lasts three days, but, spoiler alert, Moby Dick ends up destroying the whole ship leaving Ishmael as the sole survivor. This is the Ron Swanson version of the story.
- That’s it! Really simple, right? So how is it that people like me are able to spend literally years of their life studying this book and interpreting it? It’s not so much the plot as it is the narrative.
- If you’ve read Moby Dick, or started to read it and thrown it across the room in frustration, you’ll know that Melville tells this story in a weird way. You’ll know that it’s a long book, first of all, and there are chapters and chapters devoted to just basic descriptions of whales and the mechanics of whale hunting. You’l know that there are occasionally chapters that are written like a stage play instead of a novel. There’s a whole section that’s about a totally different ship, told in flashback after the events of Moby Dick. It’s weird, right? But that narrative is where the meaning comes from. It’s how the story gets told that gives us the meaning of the whole thing. Without narrative, the story is just a bunch of events; the narrative helps us figure out how we relate those events to one another. The form is as important to the story as the events that are being narrated. The thing is, this isn’t just about fiction. We are constantly constructing narratives ourselves about things we see, about events we encounter. If we see things that we think are related and can’t unpack why, it makes us uncomfortable. And sometimes, we start making them up if we can’t find them. As human beings, we need narrative. But what does this have to do with UX?
- The thing is, narrative is extremely powerful. And whether we are doing it mindfully or not, we are always already creating narratives. So we have a responsibility to be mindful of the narratives that we are telling—to each other, to our stakeholders, to our colleagues, and to our users. So let’s think a bit about the narratives we tell each other about our users.
- One of the things we strive to do as UXers is build a good understanding about our users. And over the years, we’ve built up a few ways to do that that we repeat over and over again to communicate with ourselves and others about our users. But one of the things I want us to think about is how these tools create narratives about our users, and what they do. So first of all is one that’s probably very familiar to a lot of us: the persona. We’ve probably seen good personas and bad personas but at the end of the day, a persona is a story. A persona, well-made, is a narrative that communicates some of the research we’ve done about our users. It translates pages of qualitative and quantitative data, interviews, contextual inquiries, and observations, and creates something that can be shared and understood. But if we think about this deliverable as a narrative, we can start to think about the story that a persona is telling. When we create a deliverable like a persona, we’re making narrative decisions: we’re determining what gets into the story, what gets left out. If you interview ten people to get to your persona, whose experience is getting left on the margins? Whose experience do you value? That’s a lot of responsibility, because we’re making choices about who and what we care about—about the range of, the diversity of experiences that we support.
- And what other stories does a persona tell? What about the format itself? What’s the difference between a big glossy persona that gets posted up on the wall, and one that’s a messy diagram with a bunch of post-it notes on it that you can still move around? When you present a persona to your stakeholders or to your team, what stories do each of those tell?
- * What if you add a scenario to your personas? What does that convey that your static persona doesn’t? These give our personas life, action, intent. Scenarios, Jared Spool tells us, define why the persona is important. They take something static and make it active, providing deeper context, and deeper understanding of who are users are—of the range of their experience and needs. It puts personas in MOTION, and turns them from being static portraits into dynamic, living breathing characters.
- Alternatively, we might create “user stories,” each a very brief short narrative about a character who has a desire or a conflict. But what story does a user story tell, versus a job story? Versus a “user requirements” document? What’s included, and what’s left out of this narrative?
- What if we expand into something bigger: an experience map? One that shows the totality of our user’s encounter with some facet of their world? Is this story different from the one we might tell with a customer journey? What do each of these imply about our relationship with the human being whose story we are narrating to each other? I’m asking a lot of questions here because there’s not a single answer that I can give you for how to do it right. These are all powerful tools for helping us communicate with each other in ways that make data more meaningful, more understandable—that help build empathy around the real, lived experiences of the people we’re trying to help. But what I am saying is that we need to be mindful of what we are communicating, and the narrative that we use to do that is a big part of the meaning that we are sharing.
- And then there’s the other side of this. How do all of those narratives we have created about our users, translate into the stories we tell TO our users? Because, once again, I think when we hear storytelling, we think of in terms of that plot diagram. And so we’re a bit leery of it, because we think that all of that story stuff is going to get in people’s way.
- I think that often when we create user experiences, at least when it comes to things like websites, we’re content to be like Ron. We don’t want a lot of accoutrements around the experience we’re building. We’re trained and taught to focus on the user’s top task, their goal—everything else is clutter. It gets in the user’s way. It’s “bad UX.” And that’s a narrative that we tell ourselves, too, about our users, that has a profound impact on the experience we create for them.
- So a lot of the time we start to see a bit of a line drawn between UX and content. UX designs the experience in terms of these boxes and arrows and wireframes and that kind of stuff, and then another team is responsible for filling it out. But to me, this is a risk. Because it assumes separation between the form and the content and as I’ve been trying to say tonight, the way the user gleans meaning out of an experience isn’t necessarily going to separate those things.
- Then on the content side of things, we fall back on the good ol’ inverted pyramid. And to be honest, this makes a lot of sense, it really does, in many many cases. The most important information comes first, because, as we’re told all the time, people apparently don’t read on the Internet, and this structure facilitates reading comprehension. All true! And I’m not saying this is bad or anything. A lot of the time this is exactly the right narrative structure for the job. You know, if I hit a website and I know what I want, I just want to get. I want the phone number, or a menu, or to be able to perform some transaction, and it’s really annoying when there’s a bunch of stuff in the way. But what if I don’t yet know what I want?
- Is that always the case? Is that the best way? Is it the most human-centric way? Is it really the best user experience?
- I want to tell another story now. I work for an insurance company. One of the products we sell, of course, is life insurance. This is a product that invites people to think about death. It’s a memento mori: you too will die one day. Now, we have a lot of research that tells us that people usually start shopping for life insurance after experiencing a transformative life moment. Usually it’s the birth of a child. But I don’t need research to tell me that. You see, near the end of 2012, I experienced one of the best moments of my life. I can still picture it clearly in my mind’s eye: I was sitting on the couch in the little house we were renting in Wortley. I was watching a West Wing re-run, and my wife came running down the stairs with astonished smile on her face and told me that she was pregnant. I don’t think, to that point in my life, I’d ever been happier. And probably never quite as terrified, to be honest. I probably should have bought life insurance that day. Because the other moment that prompts people to shop for life insurance is a close encounter with death. And I don’t need research to tell me about that either. Because less than three months after that happy moment, I had one of the worst moments in my life. I was sitting in a doctor’s office and a guy in a white coat who I had just met was telling me I had cancer. I’m fine now. I was lucky—very treatable, blah blah blah. I’m still hear six years later. But for a brief period of time, I had to think about the possibility of leaving behind a family with nothing but my student debt. So let me ask you this. What’s my top task here? What’s the information I need to know? What’s the information that’s just nice to know?
- It’s not “get a quote.”
- What I am saying is that when you reduce the narrative about your user down to it being about a person who always has a clear, specific goal in mind, you might be missing out one some of your users’ most significant needs. It’s a dangerous assumption because it implies that there is a specific, rational objective that at a user is aiming for. But to paraphrase Andrew Hinton, our users are not “meat machines.” We’re not robots following a set of instructions, processing inputs and outputs. Human experience is messier, more organic than that. Definitely less predictable. We are emotional creatures. Our decision-making is fuelled by emotion. When we encounter new information, we process it through our lizard brains first, and rationalize it later. But that’s not the narrative that we, as UXers, like to think about too much because it is, I think a lot harder to deal with. But when we create websites that pretend otherwise, we’re creating a narrative about the relationship we have with our users.
- So when I Google “life insurance” and the top result has a page with a bunch of these boxes on it, that’s telling me a story about exactly what I mean to to the company who created this page—and to the designer who made the page.
- I think that a lot of the time, we try to go too quickly from that inciting incident to the the resolution. Again, sometimes that’s the right move. But I think it’s dangerous to assume that it’s always the right move. Because sometimes, the narrative your user needs is in that messy middle. Sometimes that’s where the most important information is. Because sometimes the fastest route from A to B is not the best route.
- So what can we do about it? I don’t know if I have any concrete answers. This is going to get harder before it gets easier. More and more we’re seeing that we have a lot less control over both the form and content than we once did. We can’t assume a specific screen size. We can’t assume that somebody will encounter our content on a page on our website, or whether they’ll see part of it first as the “zero result” on Google, or narrated to them by a chatbot or a voice interface, or if it’ll be pulled into another experience entirely that we can’t even imagine today. but I do want to leave you with three sort of tips that I hope you can take away and apply to your own design and UX work.
- First of all, be mindful. Think about what story you are telling, whether it’s when you’re creating a persona or a wireframe or selecting imagery for your site. Be mindful of the story you’re telling and the story that you are communicating.
- Second of all, work together. Keep in mind that your users don’t see your work as being the product of separate teams; they experience it in its totality. And the sooner you start creating that way, the better. Get lots of opinions. Get diverse opinions. And listen to them. Consider them.
- Finally… Question assumptions. Our field already has a lot of actions, deliverables, outputs that are created by rote. Things that we accept as true without really questioning them because they’re what we’re taught or what we’re asked for. But never stop asking why, never stop digging in deeper, and never assume that just because it's the way things have always been done means it’s the right way or the best way. Put your user first. Actually, put the human you are designing for first.