stories a good way to spark innovation. You start by imagining a new product or a change in the environment. Then you tell a story about it, showing how people behave differently in that new situation. Here’s an example:
I live in a lovely old two-floor apartment and when I have parties, they take up both floors. What I wanted was a way for my party music to be heard all over the house, not just in the living room, and not blaring so loudly that people couldn’t hear themselves think. And I didn’t want to string wires all over the place. After some research, I bought an Acme Receiver. I have nice speakers next to it in the living room, of course, but all I had to do was plug in a set of satellite speakers in the kitchen, the office, and the upstairs hallway. There are no wires strung all over and no blaring music in any one place. So now when I create that perfect playlist for the evening, all my guests can enjoy it.
This story describes a solution to a problem without going into any technical detail about that solution. But when you read the story, did you imagine any parts of that solution?
What are the possible ways for the audio signal to get from the receiver to the satellite speakers?
How would the receiver know about the existence of the satellite speakers and is there any user setup for that?
How would the user control the volume in the various parts of the apartment?
Steve Denning, author of several books on storytelling as effective business communication, talks about a special kind of evocative story he calls a springboard story. These are short stories, almost fragments, which illustrate a typical predicament. They capture the listener’s attention by illustrating a familiar situation while suggesting how things might be different in the future. They are evocative because their goal is not to suggest a specific solution, but rather to spark the imagination and get people thinking about the problem in new ways.
“A springboard story has an impact not so much through transferring large amounts of information, but through catalyzing understanding. It can enable listeners to visualize from a story in one context what is involved in a large-scale transformation in an analogous context. It can enable them to grasp the idea as a whole not only very simply and quickly, but also in a non-threatening way. In effect, it invites them to see analogies from their own backgrounds, their own contexts, their own fields of expertise”
—Stephen Denning, The Springboard
Springboard stories highlight one powerful aspect of the Story Triangle. When an audience is inspired to think about a solution in new ways through a story they have heard, they can take ownership of the story. Once they own the story, they can sculpt and develop it in their minds. More importantly, because they own the story, they are much more likely to take that action if the story suggests it. For instance, if the solution to their story suggests reorganizing a corporate department, they might be more likely to actually do that reorganization. And they would be doing so because it was their idea, suggested by their own story, which was inspired by your springboard story.
Stories create a shared understanding
In UX work, stories about users can bring a team together with a shared understanding of their goal. These stories can be examples of the problems a product will solve, or a vision of what life might be like with the new product.
Stories can also reveal different perspectives on an experience. The stories people choose to tell and retell say a lot about their concerns and interests.
I used to work in theatre. Like some user experience projects, a theatrical production brings together a group of specialists. When I worked on a version of The Nutcracker Suite, each group had its own stories.
The design and technical staff told success stories. They focused on how they had made things go right, even in the face of real problems. These stories portrayed the staff as heroes for saving the production with their knowledge and skill.
The parents and other adults who traveled with the show to supervise the young dancers told stories about times when things went wrong, lingering over the “disasters” and chaos of a live performance. These stories emphasized the excitement of being part of a live event.
The dancers were responsible for teaching the choreography to the local children for two sections of the ballet. Their stories expressed their pride in their young students, as well as emphasizing their own skill as teachers.
The stories each group told helped them create a sense of their work on the production, but their stories also revealed differences in what this shared event meant to them.
Stories persuade
Because they are so compelling, stories can change people’s minds.
Stories can be a way to persuade others to follow your ideas. (If you are a manager or a design leader, you might want to read Steve Denning’s book, The Secret Language of Leadership. In it he looks at stories as a management tool, just as we are looking at them here as a UX design tool.) Instead of giving orders, leaders can persuade by using stories to create a vision that others want to be part of.
Good lawyers are often good storytellers. Part of a lawyer’s job is to joust using stories. Lawyers use the power of words to change the images that a story evokes in people’s minds and the emotions that go along with those images.
Michael Anderson is a First Amendment lawyer and a performing storyteller. He tells this story about how he uses story imagery and story logic to make his point.
Telling the law is about analogies. Lawyers have to retell the stories of past cases so that they sound eerily familiar, like the characters in the legend have been reincarnated here and now. With your opponents as the losers, of course.
I’m a union lawyer. I was recently arguing against a conference full of management lawyers. The issue was whether bosses have a right to force workers to attend anti-union indoctrination sessions. For 80 years, this has been an unquestioned privilege of management. Any sign of union organizing, and bam! Every worker in the plant gets marched into a mandatory anti-union “education program.” When unions complain, the employers weep about their First Amendment rights. Boo-hoo, how could anyone try to silence their free speech?
I have to explain why this is wrong. So I dig up an old religion case. An evangelical Christian construction firm tells its workers they have to attend mandatory prayer sessions. It doesn’t discriminate: it hires Jews and atheists just like anyone else. And the boss doesn’t bribe or threaten anyone. Non-Christians are free to hold to their beliefs, but they are required at the beginning of every shift to listen to a sermon or watch a film about Jesus. In the ensuing civil rights suit, the court laughs the employer out of the courtroom. Yeah, Mr. Christian construction guy, you have a sacred right to preach the Gospel. But on your own time—you have no First Amendment right to force your workers to listen as part of their jobs.
So I ask the audience of management lawyers: “Give me a show of hands, how many people think this case was wrongly decided? Who thinks an employer has a right to force its workers to listen to sermons about Jesus?” No one raised a hand.
Then I asked, “OK, so why do union-avoidance programs have more privileges than God?”
Maybe you’re not convinced
Before we get too far, let’s take a moment to address any little voices still nagging at you. You may think that stories are an unscientific way of communicating data. Or that the people you work with won’t take them seriously. Or that you don’t have the talent or skill to create and tell stories.
In a field where you sometimes feel the need to sound authoritative, stories can seem, well, not serious. Whitney once had a proposal for a presentation on stories and personas rejected with the explanation that