And so we arrive here, at the last chapter. In this book, we’ve tried to make the case for stories as a good way to communicate. People are natural story listeners, so it’s an easy way to share information. Stories can include rich information about behavior, perspectives, and attitudes. They are an economical way to communicate contextual details. When people listen to stories, their minds are engaged in the process of painting in the details. This engagement sets the stage for persuasion or a call to action.
But it can still be hard to change your own ways of communicating, especially if you are part of a team. Habits and established templates are difficult to change. It can be hard work to get to the heart of a story and tell it in just the right way for the audience. And, sometimes, stories fall flat, even when you have tried your hardest.
All we can do is urge you to take the first step and try a story or two.
At first, storytelling may be unnerving. It’s a new way of talking for some business contexts. Take it at your own pace. But try it.
Remember that to tell a good story you must think about how you will engage the audience. Stories are active, so don’t treat them as a target for blasting out information. Stories are a much richer way of communicating. They come to life in the imaginations of the people hearing them, in that triangular relationship between storyteller, story, and audience. Jasper Fforde conjured up this fanciful description of how stories work.
“The reader took up the descriptive power of the book and translated it into his or her own unique interpretation of the event—channeled from [the book] through the massive Imaginotransference Storycode Engines back at Text Grand Central and into the reader’s imagination...But the beauty of the whole process was that the reader in the Outland never suspected that there was any sort of process at all.”
—Jasper Fforde, Thursday Next: First Among Sequels
The relationships within the Story Triangle give stories their power to explain, to engage the imagination, to create a shared understanding, and to persuade. The discussion of sharing stories in Chapter 10 raises an important point about stories in user experience design: they are collected, created, and told with a purpose in order to make a point. If you don’t know why you are telling the story, you may need to think again. If you don’t know who you are telling the story to, you can’t choose the details that will make the story most effective.
We are not the first people to point out the power of stories. Annette Simmons put it in the competitive language of business when she titled her book Whoever Tells the Best Stories Wins. Stephen Denning sums up his own discovery of storytelling in The Springboard by saying that the usual tools of charts, diagrams, and rational arguments are simply too limited, that dialogue is effective but impractical for large change, and that only storytelling can empower one person to persuade many by igniting the listeners’ creativity.
Most—though not all—stories in user experience design start with really listening to other people. When you take the time to listen and observe real people, you have more opportunities. You may be surprised to find stories all around you. And when you listen deeply, the stories you find will have more resonance and will be more useful as part of the design process. They can go beyond simple anecdotes to express important aspects of behavior, goals, or culture.
There is one more reason to use stories in user experience design. It is, simply, because the power of stories allows us to see the world through a new lens. One of the hardest things to do is to understand a task, context, or experience as someone else does. But once we can see the design problem from that new perspective, we are halfway home to a solution. It might be a big, innovative new idea, or a small tweak that changes an experience from bad to good. Really listening is the start of really understanding the people who use the products, tools, and services we work on. And that’s the start of creating a great user experience.
It can be scary to try something new, but we hope you will try adding stories and storytelling to your work or using them in some new ways. Tell us how you’re using stories at our blog: 
www.rosenfeldmedia.com/books/storytelling/.
We’ll end with Kevin’s story about how he discovered stories and what happened when he brought storytelling and a particular storyteller into an environment that seemed like the antithesis of a place that could be moved by its power. You can learn more about the storyteller who changed Kevin’s life and to whom this book is dedicated at www.brotherblue.com.
The Power of Storytelling
There are those who tell stories and those who live stories—there is a difference.
When I first got up in front of people to tell a story, all I spoke about was my name. That’s it. I don’t have a long name, nor an exotic name. It’s a relatively normal sounding name—Kevin Michael Brooks. My simple story was about what my name meant to me growing up, and what it meant to my mother who named me. It was no big deal. But that was also the first time I told a story to someone who lived stories. His name was Brother Blue.
At first glance, he looked like a mad man, and it’s the least fortunate of this world who never managed to get past that. With blue beret, blue shirt, blue jacket, pants, shoes, and butterfly pins all over him, Brother Blue was the venerable symbol of storytelling in the Boston area and host of the evening when I told my first story. In his own special way, Blue helped me see the big deal of a simple story. As soon as my piece was over, Blue got up and told me and everyone there, these people soon to become my storytelling family, just what a big deal it was to talk simply about myself, with no pretense or fanfare. He saw deeper than I was looking. “That was GREAT. It was so sweet and simple... and GREAT! That was storytelling!” We became connected, he and I. And that connection was complex because he was complex, and storytelling is complex. Blue said that what he does is touch from the middle of the middle of himself to the middle of the middle of the people. His job was not just to reach the audience, but to reach inside the audience and connect with them there. That’s what he did for me that night, and I saw him do that for each and every other person who got up to tell a story that night and every night following. Blue empowered people with his listening and elevated them with his praise. That’s the moment when I was born into storytelling, or when storytelling was born into me. From then on, every Tuesday night was storytelling night.
Meanwhile, in my academic world at MIT, I was working with lots of bright technical people, trying to merge my love for writing and story with the power of the computer. It was a very different world, more heavily influenced by the deconstruction of narrative than the crafting of it. This was by no means a wrong endeavor, just a hyper-focused one. For about two years, I kept these two worlds as separate as I could: the world of construction and the world of deconstruction. I didn’t want to mingle the soft rocking caress of oral storytelling with the analysis and cold computational structures of academia. Until one day I saw an opening in my department’s colloquium series calendar, and I thought, “You know, why not? Why not invite Blue?”
I talked to Blue and his wife Ruth about it, and they agreed. Brother Blue would speak at MIT. Arrangements were made, the date was set, and all looked good. As the date approached, I thought more about what I had done. What had I done by offering to mingle my two worlds? Was I risking both? Worse yet, was I putting Blue in front of an unwinnable audience? One must understand that most of the other colloquium speakers were scientists and engineers of one type or another. They were leading theorists and practitioners, pushing the edges of their fields, helping to define the future of the world in their own special ways. Which meant that there was some similarity between them and Blue. Blue pushed the boundaries of the human heart and mind, stretching them to new capacities, telling stories for no other reason than to change the world. This is big, but still in my lab he represented a departure from the norm. The butterfly images on his face and clothing, for example—that was a departure. The balloons and ribbons tied around his arms and legs—that was a departure. A black man standing up in front of one of the world’s most prestigious, predominately white, technical institutions talking about the power of story to change the world—big departure! I was afraid that people would be unable to listen, unable to absorb a message for which a mathematical equation did not exist. “Would this work?” I wondered.
It fell to me to make a poster advertising the event. Posters would be hung all over campus to help ensure a good turnout—but what to say? Come see the storyteller? No, not enough. Black man scheduled to change the world on December 11th at 4:30 p.m.? No, might give the wrong impression and perhaps a bit too 1960s. The poster ended up including a full body picture of Blue along with his full name, Dr. Hugh Morgan Hill. I thought the “Dr.” part might offer people some level of comfort before the audience had their minds blown. I quoted what he and others had said about his work, like that middle of the middle line and how many had called him the world’s greatest storyteller. But I also prayed, “Lord, let this work. I don’t know what exactly to ask for, but please just let this work.”
The day came, and the prearranged taxi dropped Blue and Ruth off in front of my lab. A modest crowd of 50 people assembled in the auditorium, and I was nervous. Would they get it? The audience sat there like they were waiting for the math to start. Everyone looked so serious, everyone except Blue. He was busy drawing butterfly images on the palms of his hands. I was hoping that by the end of the allotted 60 minutes those hearts and minds of technology would be softened just a little. My advisor introduced him, and Blue was on. Actually, Blue was really on.
Blue did his version of Romeo and Juliet, bringing on stage a pretty woman sitting in the front row to play his Juliet. By the end, she was charmed beyond belief and the audience seeing her charmed was similarly affected. He told a version of his signature story about the caterpillar that didn’t know himself until he changed into a butterfly. And then Blue took questions from the audience with kindness and creativity until the time was up. The audience was stunned. Those technical hearts and minds I had worried about were pretty softened five minutes after the start. The world didn’t stand a chance; everything changed that day.
When it was all over, after struggling to pull Blue from the throngs of people who came up to him, I took him and Ruth up to my lab area where we had a vegetarian dinner waiting. It was Tuesday, storytelling night, and I had to get them through dinner and on their way by 6:30. But when Blue was on, he was on! And the last thing his overflowing energy allowed him to do was eat. Surrounded by graduate students, Blue launched into his version of King Lear, as told to him by his old friend Willy, accompanied by a large cast of characters he claimed were in the original story, like Ella Fitzgerald, Nat King Cole, and John Coltrane. Nobody ate. Nobody breathed. We all just watched the master.
I learned something that day about the power of storytelling. Yes, Brother Blue was a powerful storyteller, no doubt. But the most valuable lesson that Blue taught me was that to tell a story is perhaps the most powerful thing anyone can do. Brother Blue lived story and in doing so modeled how story itself can pierce any shell, academic or otherwise, and reach the waiting heart beneath; whether one is dressed like a holy fool or not. It’s the teller’s job to simply launch the story on its way and then live like their story makes a difference, because it does. Governments and cynics can scoff all they want, but Brother Blue showed us that to tell a story changes lives, and when you change enough lives, you change the world.