Why UX Designers Should Be Great Storytellers.
Designing better products with the power of Storytelling part 2.
Science needs Art.
Science is rigid. Storytelling gives us the ability to turn rigid information into a virtual world where there’re no penalties for flexible Science. Businesses need these virtual worlds and Designers can help create them via telling stories.
Here’s the part 1 of the Designing better products with the power of design series.
Let me tell you a story.
When I was a growing child, we had Saturdays all to ourselves. Growing up here in Nigeria, you had nothing to worry about. We didn’t need gadgets, expensive clothes and all that to have fun, fun was just playing outside with friends.
The Children in our neighborhood would gather together with their crayons and pieces of paper. We would sit on wooden round tables, each attempting to draw a particular character. Tom and Jerry were my favorite.
In such gatherings, there’re always two categories of children; the ones who’ll always have smiles on their faces and those who won’t; The ones who were able to draw beautifully and those who couldn’t.
I fell into the later. I concluded I wasn’t creative and couldn’t be an Art student. I avoided art all my life. I avoided it because I didn’t have control over the process of making good work. Science, on the other hand, gave me hope. If I knew the formula, I could get the answer and be happy. There’s always a structure to things. So I became a Scientist.
This little story applies to a lot of people I’ve met.
People avoid things they can’t control.
This is what happens in business, business people hate uncertainty, they can’t invest in something that can’t be linked directly to profit. If it can’t be controlled and predicted, they’ll hardly consider it.
This is why some companies find it difficult to adopt design. They hear designers say things like Design is emotional, fighting for the user, happiness, delight, those things aren’t directly measurable, so like young be, they’ll avoid it and stick to measurable things.
The question is, how can designers talk about such things without appearing like we aren’t ruining the business? how can designers talk about things that can’t be measured in order to give people they work with the ability to think like artists, with a loosed mind and see things from a different perspective? and most importantly, how can designers put Humans at the center of their work in order to understand and solve their most difficult problems?
In design immature companies, designers face challenges from “people at the table”. Decisions that can harm the product are usually made without considering their impact. There’s hardly investment in design of the product they make.
So how can storytelling help?
Stories are lives inside people’s heads. Their ability to command cognitive and emotional effort makes it impossible for us to ignore them.
“After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the things we need most” -Philip Pullman.
The emotional need for stories can enable us to fuse large information into story structures and have people cognitively involved. This is possible because when we hear stories, we relate them to our lives.
Every story is a personal story.
When we tell stories, people become too cognitively and emotionally busy creating images that they can’t be bored and can’t doubt information we share.
Stories can help us understand the people we design for.
It’s easy to think you understand something. The truth is; your understanding of something is shaped by what you are and the perspective you see with. As designers, our most important skill is understanding the problem we’re trying to solve.
Telling stories about the user experience can help give us a virtual world where we are the people we design for. This can help us see things from their perspective and understand what shapes it.
Such UX stories are collected during research and can guide us through the design process. These stories can be told to people we work with to give them a sample of the experience from another perspective.
Stories can help us organize information.
People don’t like to be talked at, they want to be talked to. While other forms of presentations are a one-way process, storytelling involves the flow of energy from the storytellers to the listeners and back. The storyteller provides enough structures to the audience and they are actively engaged, they form the images in their heads.
They keep asking the question; what happened next?
Great stories are filled with conflicts, whenever humans sense conflict, they anticipate resolution.
Research has analyzed the brains of people when they listened to stories. Guess what they saw.
They observed that the listener’s brain directly matched with that of the person telling the story. And in some cases, the structures in the listeners brains also formed before that of the storyteller. Designers can make use of this power to engage and inspire team members in order to produce delightful experiences.
Designers can use storytelling to deeply understand problems and generate solutions.
A designers job is to solve problems. But most problems we solve aren’t our problems. Your approach to solving a particular problem will change when your relationship with the problem changes.
As Designers, we want to know what the problem looks like from as many perspectives as possible. From the people experiencing the problem, from the designer’s perspective, from the Engineers, and the business perspectives.
Storytelling can walk us through the sensory experience of what the problem looks like and can give us enough context to propose solutions that come from a deep understanding of the problem.
Understanding of the problem comes from research. Storytelling can be a good way to put every team member on the same page. By telling stories from research findings, team members can connect to the problem at a deeper emotional level.
An example of how to elicit bright design solutions to problems is to tell stories of what the experience looks like and have team members complete the stories with solutions and since humans have the natural tendency to seek resolution of conflict, they’ll produce brighter ideas than when they are just told facts about the user experience.
Stories can help us persuade.
While persuade might not be the most appropriate word, it sure explains what I mean to say.
One power of storytelling is that it can change what people think over time. Humans have been largely shaped by stories and they live by them. Religiously, Politically, a whole lot of what you know and believe might just be cooked up stories passed from generations to generations. Huge cultural dynamics can be attributed to stories told and not told. These stories structure our values and ethics. They are valuable in instilling values in teams and organisations.
Stories can sell arguments of all forms and do it in a way that we can tolerate. For designers, this is exactly what we want. We want people to always think about the Humans we design for. We could model this world through stories.
Telling sincere stories of how design solves problems at other companies and even at our various companies.
Researchers admit that small doses of stories over a period of time are a powerful step in changing what people value over time.
Stories are memory aids, instruction manuals and moral compasses.
- Aleks Krotoski, author, broadcaster, journalist and social psychologist.
Great Brands Are Great Storytellers.
Seth Godin says it all.
Marketing is no longer about the stuff that you make, but about the stories you tell.
If you want to know how strong a company’s brand is, ask people who use their product. They always have something exceptional to say about why they love the product.
Most of the time, it’s not about the performance or design of the product, it’s just the story they’ve believed. The essence of branding and identity is to create a niche, space where those who fit into your vision may live happily and comfortably.
Great brands have their stories. But most importantly, their stories must support the stories of people who use their products.
Think about Nike for instance, they constantly tell stories about individuals achieving more athletic success when using their products, they tell users that they celebrate their victories. No athlete wants to ever lose. And the crazily passionate ones would do anything to win. Success is the story they’ll ever want to tell.
There’ll be an automatic connection when products can tell their stories as it relates to the people they design for. Designers can use the power of storytelling to visually and emotionally craft designs that tell appealing and connecting stories.
Storytelling is a valuable asset for experience designers to sell what they design, to sell value and make an impact at the places they work at and the people they work with. I’ll close with this quote from Mike Monteiro
I’d rather have a good designer who can present well than a great designer who can’t. In fact, I’d argue whether it’s possible to be a good designer if you can’t present your work to a client. Work that can’t be sold is as useless as the designer who can’t sell it.
Science needs Art.
Lately, I’ve been amazed at the potentials of stories in designing delightful experiences and products. I decided to explore Storytelling. I’ll share with you when I learn something new.
I make a lot of storytelling noise on social media. Follow me on LinkedIn and Twitter.
