Storytelling for User Experience. Kevin Brooks
and forms from a government agency.
They were intelligent and articulate people, but most of them hadn’t had much education. My audience was a government agency, which tended to discount less educated citizens.
In retelling their stories for my report, I decided to clean up incorrect grammar or dialect that might be interpreted as a lack of education or sophistication. My solution was to use the same terminology and basic sentence construction as I’d heard, but to correct the sort of grammatical errors that most people make when speaking.
You may decide to create slightly different versions of a story for different audiences or for when you place the story in different contexts. Think carefully about how to preserve the authenticity of the story as you transform it.
Accepting the responsibility for changing the details of a story to amplify the truth is part of building an experience. You may create a composite story based on several incomplete stories from your research or a composite character, like a persona. In any case, you, the storyteller, must be a careful judge of whether you have slipped too far from an ethical story that reflects the truth you want to communicate.
End the story well
We offer one final word on the ethics of stories. When you tell a story, you make a connection with the audience, who in turn makes a connection to your story. Your job as the storyteller is to facilitate those relationships. When the story ends, the audience has been through something of a journey, whether it is one of narrative events, challenging ideas, or emotional states. The final resolution of the story—the last images or emotions the audience experiences—affect their impressions of the story as a whole, no matter what came before. You need to end the story in a safe place for the audience, one from which they can complete that journey in their minds. This does not mean that every story needs to have a happy ending, but that the ending affects the audience’s receptivity to the entire experience.
This is an ethical issue because as a storyteller, you lead the audience to ideas, experiences, and emotional terrain they would not have traveled on their own.
The storyteller has a responsibility to choose an ending that not only suits the purpose of the story, but also allows the audience to incorporate that story safely into their lives and work.
More reading
Professional ethics codes
American Psychological Association Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct: www.apa.org/ethics/code2002.html
Code of Ethics of the American Anthropological Association: www.aaanet.org/committees/ethics/ethcode.htm
Usability Professionals’ Association Code of Professional Conduct: www.usabilityprofessionals.org/about_upa/leadership/code_of_conduct.html
ICC/ESOMAR International Code on Market and Social Research: www.esomar.org/index.php/codes-guidelines.html
Market Research Society: www.mrs.org/uk/standards/codeconduct.htm
Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Code of Ethics: www.hfes.org/web/AboutHFES/ethics.html
Summary
When you use material from other people in your user experience stories, you have an ethical responsibility not only to the story, but to your sources as well.
When you collect stories from other people, you have to consider how you can treat them—and their stories—responsibly.
Research ethics from professional associations offer useful guidance.
You must think carefully about your own ability to influence user research and how you will “translate” users’ stories (if at all).
Chapter 5
Stories as Part of a UX Process
UX is a cross-disciplinary practice
Using stories in user experience design is not a new idea
Stories can be part of many UX activities
Now that we’ve explored what a story is, the ethics of telling them, and how stories empower people through listening, it’s time to think about how all of this fits into user experience design.
If you are looking for inspiration at a specific point in a project, the chapters in this section each focus on one aspect of user experience design, in a roughly chronological order.
We are not going to promote one approach to user experience design over another, nor are we going to promote a new methodology based on using stories. Whether you believe in user-centered design, goals-based design, or even a more technical approach like domain-driven design, stories have a place in your work.
Despite the number of approaches to user experience design, the core is usually quite simple, so we will stick to this generic process: start by understanding the context, put that understanding to work in creating the design, and then test the design as it is fleshed out to be sure that the product will be a good fit.
There’s even an international standard that describes this generic process—the “human-centered design process for interactive systems.” Its official name is ISO 13407, but it’s being updated as ISO 9241-210 to broaden its scope from usability to user experience. Figure 5.1 shows a simplified diagram of the stages of the process.
Figure 5.1
A model of a human-centered design process.
It starts with planning, working within a process—any process—that provides a structure for your work. It doesn’t have to be a rigid plan (although some of you may work within a highly structured product lifecycle). But if you don’t plan time for user experience work, or make room for understanding users within your methodology, it just won’t happen.
The rest of this process is a cycle of activities through which you will build and test your design:
Understand (conduct user research and investigate the context of use)
Specify (analyze the business and user research to define what the product will do)
Design (create the actual product design, from early sketches to final designs)
Evaluate (check the designs to be sure they meet the goals for the product)
There are three important features of this process.
First, it’s iterative. Ideas can be tested and either accepted or discarded. Designs can be created and tested until a good solution is found. This also allows a user experience design team to start with rough sketches or