There is no conflict between research ethics and storytelling. A story is not just a collection of facts, but of information structured to appeal to an audience’s logic and emotion. To be a good storyteller in user experience, you need honesty and authenticity, along with a simplicity or clarity of expression. These are tools the storyteller uses in any application of storytelling to craft the material and the presentation so that the audience sees something new.

When you tell a story with simplicity, you use just enough details to be clear and to help your audience recognize the honesty and authenticity of the story and no more.

Stories and storytelling are very powerful parts of the human experience. It’s not simply that people happen to enjoy stories; they need them and want to believe them. Where pure logic and reason are not effective, stories provide a form of reason that is often so effective that it moves people to thought and action.

This means that storytellers have an important ethical responsibility to their audience and possibly to the world. History is full of examples of people who have told good stories, in the right way, at the right time, to the right audience, and moved them to radical change—sometimes for good, but often enough not. Every revolution or coup starts with a good story. And after a revolution, it is often the storytellers—the artists, the journalists—of the former regime who are silenced.

At this point one might think, “But I’m just redesigning the Web site for my startup. I’m not interested in regime change.” Fine. Understand, though, that the tools for both are the same. Stories and storytelling are important for design in part because stories can shape and change minds. Use that power well and use it wisely.

The Code of Ethics of the American Anthropological Association addresses many of the issues that you must consider when creating stories from user research material. This includes your responsibility to the people with whom you work and those you study. Their guidelines begin with the overarching requirement to “avoid harm to the individuals or groups you work with” (including both your colleagues and people you meet during user research), and they continue with four specific requirements that are just as relevant to stories as to any other user research.

The Code of Professional Conduct of the Usability Professionals’ Association (UPA) includes similar guidelines, as do those of many other user experience professional organizations. The Code of Ethics of the Human Factors and Engineering Society (HFES) includes another principle relevant to storytelling: “Avoid sensationalism, exaggeration, and superficiality that constitutes deception.” The American Psychological Association (APA) has a detailed code of ethics covering similar aspects of working with people as part of your research.

All of these ethical considerations come into play when you are collecting, creating, or telling user experience stories.

Think carefully about your own ability to influence user research. This influence, or “reflexivity,” works in both directions: Our presence, attitudes, and behavior can affect the people we work with, and they can affect us.

For example, there is a narrow line between providing people with an opportunity to tell their story and leading them to perspectives, opinions, or ideas that they might not express without your urging. This sort of influence might include the following:

These are, of course, pitfalls of any user research. It’s just good practice to think carefully about how much the situation in which you collected your observations is an accurate reflection of “real life.” It’s especially important in stories because their emotional impact can magnify any distortions or simply convince you (or someone else) of something that may not be exactly true.

Stories can be a good way to communicate uncomfortable truths or even to shock. For example, when you have learned something in a user research or evaluation session that contradicts the team’s current beliefs, a story can provide the explanation and context to help make the news believable.

A Story Can Deliver Good News...and Bad News

Ginny Redish, an early advocate of the value of observing users, tells this story about using information collected in the field to share bad news about a product idea.

This is a story from the days when many companies were first moving from dumb terminals with green screens to graphical user interfaces (GUIs), and object-oriented programming was just becoming popular. One of my clients was very excited about the new possibilities, and the developers decided to redo one of their major applications as a test case.

They sent business analysts out to the field to gather requirements from the field staff who were the users of this application (and many others that the company had). The business analysts went out all fired up to tell field staff about the new computers they would be getting—after all, GUIs couldn’t run on the old dumb terminals.

But their enthusiasm was dampened by the users’ realities and the users’ stories. The business analysts brought back photos of the users’ workspaces (incredibly cramped, with not an inch of space for a second monitor), and they told the story of meeting with Jack, a 50-year-old who had been doing the job in one town for more than 20 years. They played their tape of Jack asking, ‘Are you changing all of our applications? No? Then we’ll still need our old terminals for all our other work. Where are we going to put the computer we’ll need to use your new program?’

Jack’s story was bad—but very important—news for the developers. No one had thought beyond the excitement of picking one application to change.”

The more difficult the message your story has to communicate, the more careful you must be to ensure that the story reflects reality.

When stories are presented as part of research, you have an obligation to be sure that they reflect the full picture of the people and context. You need to make sure that the stories are “true,” meaning that they are an accurate representation of the situations involved, whether you are telling the story of a single event from a single participant or creating a composite with material from several different people.

All of this does not mean that the story should be a verbatim account. For instance, you might change details to protect the anonymity or privacy of the participant. But the story must reflect the real details, not be overstated or idealized beyond what you would present in any other analysis report.

This is just good practice. If you are using stories to help guide user experience design, you want them to accurately express what you know about users and their context. Another way to think about accuracy is to look at whether the stories you have chosen to tell reflect the big picture. It’s easy to be seduced by an interesting story that is an outlier, an interesting or amusing anecdote that does little to illuminate the user experience (or worse, seems to poke fun at the person). It’s also easy to avoid stories that carry a message you don’t like. Maybe it suggests a design direction you don’t agree with. Or it reinforces an idea that your audience doesn’t want to hear.

The need to keep stories true is especially important if you work in a domain where there are experts. If you distort details, you risk creating a story that distracts the expert audience from the point of the story with its inaccuracies. And by sticking close to the original story, you can shift easily into a more detailed account when necessary by going back to the original research.

The common saying, “Never let the facts get in the way of a good story,” presents a fine line that storytellers walk all the time. Performing storytellers have a greater latitude here, as the story is their product, and the audience’s perceived value of their story is something close to instantaneous. The audience doesn’t have to hold it, handle it, click on it, operate its menus, plug it in, or interface it to their PC. They simply have to experience the story.

Experience designers have a much finer line to walk, but walk it they must. To only relate facts is not storytelling, it’s regurgitation. On the other hand, to play fast and loose with the facts risks distorting the truth, which diminishes the value of the story.

An audience may not actually comment on your story’s authenticity. But if it isn’t authentic, they will absolutely notice. One of the challenges in using research data as the basis for a story is deciding how much to “clean up” the language or details from the way you originally heard them.

There are many issues here. For example, if there is a large difference in socioeconomic class or authority between the participant and your audience, you have to decide whether a verbatim transcript will keep a story “true” or whether it might inadvertently make the person you heard it from seem less educated or competent than they are. There is a careful balance between preserving the original form of expression and harming the dignity of your source.

Cleaning Up Spoken Language for Written Presentation

Caroline Jarrett works with government agencies on their communication with citizens and businesses. In these projects, she is aware of her role as an intermediary between ordinary people and their government.

I conducted a series of informal visits with small business owners, where they chatted happily to me as we looked at a group of Web pages, letters, 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.

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.

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

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.