The Use of Stories in User Experience Design (original) (raw)
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Stories capture the characteristics of the design space and audience that designers and engineers need to understand to build a complete and useful software experience. A story is a design communication tool that transcends the cultural divides of multidisciplinary teams and intertwines a technology with its user's goals. This article describes how stories are powerful tools in software design, defines the elements that make a compelling story, and presents the use of stories at IBM from the authors' experience. It also explores the benefits at each phase of the design process and how stories evolve throughout the design process.
S.: The Use of Stories in User Experience Design
2002
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As designers we tell stories as we engage in the design process. But how does one story differ from another? Are there storytelling types used during different parts of the process? What form and function do these stories take? In this paper we explore the nature of storytelling in the context of design and how it plays different roles throughout the process: (1) during research to explain user stories; (2) during ideation to expand the design space and explore problems; (3) as a prototyping tool; and so on. We also will describe inappropriate uses of storytelling in the design process; for example, telling pristine and unreal stories rather than keeping the story "roughly right." Examples of each of these classifications will be presented in the paper, illustrating good techniques throughout. Finally, implications for design pedagogy will be discussed.
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Several design studies have looked at the potential of using narratives to enrich the design process or to create more engaging experiences with designed objects. However, the concept of narrative is still fuzzy and open to interpretations, due to its use and meaning in different disciplines and approaches. In order to deepen the knowledge of narrative use in design, this paper presents three categorizations that survey the what, where and why of narratives in design, respectively. First, it discusses five definitions of narratives based on narrative theory. Secondly, it proposes a typology that classifies the occurrences of narratives in design. Thirdly, it analyses the roles and functions of narratives in designed products and the design process. Finally, using the proposed categorizations, it shows strategies for a narrative approach to design richer experiences for products and discusses techniques for the design process. To conclude, future developments of the project are described, including a call for design projects that involve narratives to be included in a database.
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Software development is a multidisciplinary process with typically many stakeholders being involved. This paper looks at stories as a means to consider their different viewpoints. Although stories are generally appreciated to increase empathy and evoke discussion, the understanding of what forms a story differs widely from sub-discipline to subdiscipline. The paper discusses applications of different kinds of stories and their cross-pollination with other behavioral models. Domain-specific languages are used to specify story-related behavior by task models and statecharts. The organization of business trips is used as a running example to illustrate the ideas.
Sharing design perspectives through storytelling
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Design consists of analyzing scenarios and proposing artifacts, obeying the initial set of requirements that lead from initial to goal state. Finding or creating alternative solutions, analyzing them and sele cting the best one are expected steps on designers´ decision making process. Very often, not a sole designer, but a team of them is engaged in the design process sharing their expertise and responsibility to achieve optimum projects. In a design team, most conflicts occur due to misunderstanding of one's assessment over specifications and contexts.
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This paper reports an initial study using cultural probes to support design. Its aim was to provide designers and design students with ethnographic information not easily accessible via surveys, interviews, and user statistics. Our research applied the cultural probes method to domestic ironing practices. We communicated the narrative and pictorial data generated by this method to designers and asked them to interpret these data in terms of a new ironing board design. Finally, we conducted a content analysis to reveal how designers interpreted and used data from cultural probes to inform design ideas.
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This paper challenges claims made by Scrum proponents when characterising the communicative nature of user stories: including being more 'authentic' because they comprise spoken language and that they are stories. We argue and decisively demonstrate that neither can be upheld. By incorrectly characterising user stories, we miss opportunities to understand what they are and how they work during development. User stories are better understood by applying a functional theory of communication that emphasises how language is used. By selecting systemic functional linguistics, we can analyse user stories, and have developed a method for factoring unwanted epics into usable user stories.
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As designers grapple with the increased complexity of today’s problems, traditional presentation techniques used to effect knowledge transfer to client organizations are proving inadequate. Traditional presentation conventions have their roots in the transfer model—an academic-style practice that presumes stakeholders in the decision-making process come to the interaction with shared levels of expertise, context, content, language and objective. In this paper, we argue we have a new communication context, where many more individuals are exchanging information with low-context audiences with differing objectives. This shift in context and purpose demands a shift in mindset from a transfer model of communication towards an experience model, where the design of shared experience and emotion play an equal role in connecting stakeholders with the information and concepts. We show how designers can instead create constructed story environments that help stakeholders establish a sustained and actionable connection with the information—a connection that fosters emotional and intellectual contact with important work.
2014
Users’ emotions are crucial for purchasing decisions. Designing products that evoke positive emotions requires knowledge about users and their psychological needs: the research on User Experience (UX) aims at creating such knowledge. Several UX researchers highlighted that positive emotions emerge in user/product interactions, when user’s psychological motives and needs are met and her/his expectations fulfilled or exceeded. How can user s’ motives be acquired? User research in industrial practice usually contributes with insights about users in form personas, user feedback and interviews, but not explicitly with the motives to be addressed. This work aims at creating a systematic method for deriving and understanding user s’ motives through the analysis of stories, such as those in product reviews. The identified motives can serve as input for UX design. Thus, basing of existing techniques for the narrative analysis of stories, a method for extracting users’ motives is proposed and...