Stickynotes episode 12, August 27 2020
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Details from this session
A large proportion of UX work involves telling stories about user behavior to disbelieving team members and executives. What’s the best way to successfully get the message across?
In this session, we discussed using a simple story arc to get some core concepts across. Although there are several different story arcs, the most common is that the hero starts on a journey, experiences adversity, then overcomes the adversity and returns home happier.
We applied the story arc both to describing user experiences with products through a journey map or story map, and to describing our work in portfolios.
In both instances, telling a story around the information ties it together and makes it more real for the people listening.
- For a development team, hearing user research results as a story makes them more believable, and helps the team understand what they can do to help the hero overcome adversity, rather than adding more adversity to the process.
- For a hiring manager, viewing your portfolio through the context of a story about how you helped a team succeed allows them to see how you could also help their company succeed.
So, how can you ensure you tell good stories?
Amanda had a book recommendation: The User’s Journey:
Storymapping Products That People Love by Donna Lichaw. The User’s Journey will show you how, when, and why to use narrative structure, technique, and principles to ideate, craft, and test a cohesive vision for an engaging outcome.
Cory also emphasized that it’s important to tell the story with empathy. It’s not useful to cast the development team as the villain in the story, because that will make them defensive. Instead, they need to see themselves as champions for the story’s hero. Cory has a course on LinkedIn Learning all about empathy, Empathy in UX Design.
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