The most obvious place to collect stories is in qualitative research: ethnography, contextual inquiry, focus groups, and interviews all center on observing (and listening to) people. As we listen, we hear not just what they choose to say, but also how they say it and what they leave out. Some stories are explicit, offered as a straightforward explanation and ready to be collected. Others must be teased out, deduced from what is not said, or discovered by also collecting details about the context.

When you are there, you can hear and see all of the small details that make up an experience. This is especially true of emotional reactions, or those happy accidents that only occur when you don’t plan them.

Which Remote Controller is More Fun?

Back in the early 90s when I was in grad school, Philips was in the process of developing a short-lived technology called CD-I or Compact Disc Interactive. As part of their sponsorship of my graduate program, they loaned us one of their CD-I players, along with some games designed for the system and two different controllers. When Christmas time rolled around and all the other grad students were going back home for the holidays, I asked if I could borrow the CD-I player and its accessories to try out in our home, something I knew my three small children were going to love. I loved it too because it was free, that magic price for grad students.

We had a big Christmas dinner with friends and other families with small children, so there were plenty of people to try it out. As I watched them, I came away with two important observations to share with Philips.

First, apparently no product testing had been done in an actual home with children, because when little feet ran through the house or even just walked heavily, the vibrations from the wooden floor would cause the CD-I player to skip or even cause a program to hang. The system probably worked great in a lab building with a concrete floor, but not in an actual home, the very place Philips intended for its use.

The second observation had to do with the two wired remotes. One was simple, small, black, and completely unremarkable. It had directional buttons and action buttons. You eventually learned how to use this utilitarian piece of equipment.

The second controller was a “children’s controller,” but in reality it was a better fit for the adults, too. The six-inch trackball was bright yellow, the base was white, and the various large side buttons were red and blue. The plastic it was made from was comfortable and felt substantial.

It was fun to use, worked well, and required no learning—you just used it! It was the best piece of design and engineering we had seen from Philips. We all loved it. I’m not sure if it ever hit the market. If it did, it probably did much better than the CD-I player itself.

If you can’t be there, you can find stories all around you. For example, user research that primarily aims at learning answers to a specific set of closed questions can also be a source of stories. Surveys and usability testing usually include opportunities for people to answer open-ended questions or to comment. These comments may be very short stories, or might hint at a story that can be collected later.

Even if you can’t do direct user research, you can glean stories from many indirect sources.

You can use material from these sources along with stories gleaned from the user research you are currently doing. Each source will provide you with slightly different types of stories, all useful in creating a rich and well-rounded view of the user experience.

Another source of stories are the many social media networks. Official and informal support sites and user forums can be an easy way to find stories about using specific types of products or solving problems. More general social networks can provide insights into many different kinds of activities and interactions.

It can take work to dig through these sites, but they can be rich repositories of information. Not only do people tell stories, but others in the group react to them and often expand on a first comment or question with stories of their own. This gives you ready-made clusters of stories on a related topic.

You don’t usually set out to capture stories directly. But with a little effort, you can watch for story opportunities and structure your user research to allow time to listen to them.

When you plan a user research session, you usually have a series of questions in mind, and you set up the session so you can get those answers. You probably include time for follow-up questions or to probe more deeply into motivations and attitudes. Listening for stories is no different. When you allow time for a bit of wandering, or give the people you work with space to think carefully, you can get beyond the top layer of information to explore not only the background but also the deeper layers of experience behind their answers. That’s where you will often find the best stories.

For example, you might be testing a new concept for a television remote control. You ask each person you work with to complete a series of tasks to see how easily they can use the new design and how well the features fit into the way they might use the remote. After each task, you might ask them to assess their experience. That conversation might go something like this:

As the researcher, you now have two choices. After you write “no problems” or “successful in task” on your notes, you can continue to the next task. Or you can back up to that throwaway comment about the participant’s husband. There is a story there, and you have a chance to find out what it is. What is the difference between these two people? How do they use technology in their household to work around (or make use of) this difference? This sort of story is not just a source of material to spice up a final report. These stories encourage new understanding and point to previously unnoticed usage areas. In other words, these stories can lead to new product ideas!

The simplest way to elicit stories is to ask for them. Give the people you are working with permission to give you more than the shortest possible answer. Instead of asking several short questions, you can just ask one open-ended question. Or you can follow up with a broad invitation to talk. It might go something like this:

Now you know that this person not only buys things online, but also still browses catalogs to find things to purchase. You also know that they play a little game with themselves to make sure they only buy things they really want. This is a detail that you can weave into a larger story about how people mix different sources of information as they shop.

Once you get into the habit of asking “Why?” or “Tell me about that,” you will find that just asking people to tell you about themselves is often enough to get them started. Remember: Stories start with listening. Your job as an interviewer is to give the participants your attention and make it comfortable for them to talk.

Another way to collect stories is to get a group of people to tell stories to each other. There’s a natural tendency for one story to lead to another and for each person to want to tell their own story. You can make use of this bad listening habit to create more story-collecting opportunities.

One of the classic problems in focus groups is that the more confident participants can overwhelm those who are less confident about speaking up. This often includes people from lower social backgrounds or those who are not as well educated. According to Jon Cohen, who helped develop the BBC’s Read and Write literacy strategy in 2005, storytelling is a powerful means to allow people with low literacy to express themselves.

For example, you can weave storytelling into a focus group session. In a typical focus group, you might start with a prototype of some kind, perhaps just an image or a story that the moderator tells. Then the moderator asks a series of questions. Some people will leap forward to answer the questions. Some of them will tell a quick story as an example. As the moderator, you can use this moment to encourage others to tell their own stories, with each one building on the last. As with any group, you have to make sure that everyone gets their turn. These quiet participants may be more comfortable telling a story, or adding a little bit to another story, than expressing an opinion or answering a direct question.

Sometimes you Learn More than you Expect

I did a small research project exploring a new concept for a physical therapy device for people recovering from a stroke. This was a hard context for me to understand. I knew little about the routines of physical therapy and rehabilitation centers. Stroke patients have their entire world turned upside-down in ways I could only begin to imagine.

We didn’t have a product to work with, just a few drawings to illustrate the concept. Instead of running one-on-one interviews, we put together groups of three people and encouraged them to talk to each other. They quickly began asking each other about their experiences in rehab, almost ignoring me. All I had to do was listen to this conversation.

One of the more interesting things we learned was how much they hated rehab. The concept included a way for patients to monitor their own progress. It turned out that this feature tapped into the deep frustration they felt about how helpless they were after their stroke. We learned a lot more than simply whether they liked a new product concept.

One of the side benefits of small groups like this is that it gives people a chance to be listened to and to have their experiences acknowledged by others. When you can create a safe place for this to happen, you will gain much deeper insights into the user experience.

The technique of collecting narratives is at the heart of the Critical Incident Technique developed by John Flanagan. Instead of asking for an opinion about a product or experience, you ask the person to tell you about a specific recent experience. This formal methodology is often used for evaluating the performance of mission-critical systems, but you can use the general approach to get people to tell you the story of a single event. It can be an interesting way to get people to tell you about routine experiences.

Life and Death—an Incident that Changed My Perspective

Chauncey Wilson, who has an encyclopedic knowledge of research methods, describes this as a practical use of the Critical Incident method.

When I’m visiting a customer site, I try to ask the people I interview to tell me a story about how an application or system helped or hurt their work or reputation. One of the most memorable stories that I’ve heard when I asked this question occurred during interviews at a prestigious medical center.

I was discussing the usability of backup and recovery software with an information technology (IT) manager and asked him if there were any critical incidents with this software in the last few months. He thought for a second and recounted a story about how the system had worked well for many months with no problems.

During this time, the person who set it up left for a better job and a new, much less experienced technician was the replacement. A few months before my visit, the medical center had a major power failure and the new technician, unfamiliar with how to start the recovery (which required some manual intervention), took several hours to get the system back. My interviewee said, “That was really bad because we have come to depend on computerized data in patient rooms and even in some surgery rooms. Not having data for even a few minutes earlier could be a life or death situation.”

I knew that time lost for getting a system back after a power failure or other catastrophe could cost a company a great deal of money—millions of dollars in the case of major financial institutions—but this short story from the IT manager changed my perspective about the consequences of unusable backup and recovery software. Since then, I’ve thought that poor usability for some systems can have harsh, even dangerous repercussions for those who depend on timely, accurate data.

A second more practical lesson was that, when you automate processes and they run fine for a long time without intervention, you need to make memorability a key focus for the user interface used to fix or restore a system that breaks.

These stories not only give you examples of events or user behavior, but also information about the context in which those events occurred. You’ll use these contextual details later when you construct your own stories.

If you are watching as someone does something, watch how they do it in addition to listening to what they say about it. Their behavior may offer a story as rich as their words.

Sometimes the simplest activities may offer unexpected insights into the user experience.

While we were collecting stories for this book, we heard a lot of anecdotes about seemingly small observations that led to large improvements to the user experience:

You probably have your own stories like that. Details so small that no one would think to mention them that became the basis for an innovation.

When you go into a new situation, everything is unfamiliar and strange to you. Those early moments, before you become an “insider,” are your opportunity to observe stories about how people interact with objects in their environment and with other people. In their chapter on conducting site visits in User and Task Analysis for Interface Design, Ginny Redish and JoAnne Hackos talked about the importance of taking specific notes on the environment, including the way the furniture is arranged, the decorations and notes around someone’s workspace, the lighting, or any special clothing or safety equipment. Similarly, if you are in someone’s home or personal environment, you want to take notes on how they have arranged that environment to make it their own.

Anthropologists talk about contextual observation as a way of making the familiar strange or the strange familiar. Genevieve Bell and her colleagues at Intel study the home and familiar settings like kitchens. They talk about defamiliarization as a way of looking critically at a context or object to see it in a new way. In an article, “Making by Making Strange: Defamiliarization and the Design of Domestic Technologies,” they describe how they use detailed descriptions to force themselves to observe well-known settings closely and see a familiar environment and its objects in a new light.

Seeing the familiar in a new way can be difficult if you work in a specialist field like technology or medicine. You may have absorbed basic concepts to the point that you can’t imagine not knowing them. Stories from people encountering a situation that incorporates these concepts for the first time can help you and your colleagues remember what that experience is like.

Careful observation of the physical environment is also important if you are working in a situation that is new to you. We don’t usually tell stories about routine things. As Steve Denning puts it, “fish don’t tell stories about water.” So it’s up to you to notice these details and how they affect the people in the environment.

When you question basic assumptions, you’ll find new opportunities.

Train Doors Open from the Inside, Right?

You’d think there’s nothing easier than opening a door. On my first trip to England, I attended a conference that was in two parts, the first part in Brighton and the second in Southampton. The two cities are located only 60 miles apart on the southern coast of Britain, but at that time, to travel between them by train, I had to travel north most of the way to London, then get a connecting train back down south to the other city.

Over dinner in London, my colleagues gave me detailed instructions. Even after two or three large glasses of wine, I figured I’d be able to get on and off the proper trains.

The time came when we had to leave our quaint British pub, and they took me to the station. I got on the train, sat down, and got out my train timetable, keeping close track of the passing stations. As the train approached my stop, I got up, walked to the nearest door, and prepared to get off.

That’s when I noticed there was no door handle. I couldn’t open the door. Must be an entrance-only door, I thought, and walked to the next door in the train car. Again, no door handle, as the train slowed at my stop. I quickly walked to the next train car, three doors—no handles. Next car—same thing.

By this time, the train had stopped. I was about to miss my stop and end up lost. The next door I came to had a window that was partially open, so I reached through the window to the handle on the outside, opened the door, and jumped from the accelerating train.

When James Bond jumps from a moving vehicle, he deftly rolls and gets up without a spot on his white tuxedo. Landing there in a crumpled heap, I was so not 007. That’s when it hit me: I JUST JUMPED FROM A MOVING TRAIN! I COULD HAVE BEEN KILLED!

At the end of the conference, I was on the train again to get to Heathrow airport. Traveling with a small group this time, I asked a native Brit why there were no handles on the inside of train doors. “Oh, you’re supposed to reach through the window and open the door from the outside. It’s a safety feature.”

You may want to bring back pictures as a way of reminding yourself of what you saw and to give you images to illustrate your stories. Your notes and photos can also shed new light on what you heard. Do the users’ descriptions match what you observed? If not, you may have the beginning of an interesting story about different perceptions.

They Meant What They Said

In one usability test, we worked with older women who used the Web but reported that they often had trouble finding information they wanted. During the session, the participants used several different sites to look for answers to their own questions. They were allowed to browse in their own way and to take as much time as they wanted. Several of them mentioned feeling “uncomfortable” on the Web, even people who seemed to navigate around sites with no problems.

It wasn’t until a week or so after the sessions that we realized the significance of the word “uncomfortable.” We had assumed they meant that they were unsure about what they were doing, but we were wrong.

We had videotaped the sessions, using a camera in the corner of the room, giving us a diagonal view of the people with a wide enough angle to see their whole upper body. Many of the women were straining their necks forward so they could see the screen without their reading glasses. Sitting in that position for almost an hour must have been physically difficult, especially for people who were not used to working at the computer for long periods of time.

They really were uncomfortable—physically uncomfortable. It wasn’t a metaphor at all.

If you are used to conducting very structured research sessions, you may find that gently directing the conversation and flow of information is harder than just asking a series of prepared questions. Even when you are experienced at collecting stories, you need to be ready to deal with things that can derail your work.

Don’t get distracted

Sometimes what people have to tell you is important to them but not that valuable to your research. Other times, it’s the opening to a much richer understanding. As a researcher, you have to be in control and practice the art of listening without being distracted from your goal. You don’t want to cut off someone who has a story they need to tell. (Remember, stories start with listening.) But you don’t want to let a story take you off track, either. Most of the time, you need to keep the user research session on track while remaining open to valuable tangents.

If someone veers off into a story that isn’t exactly what you are interested in, you need to decide how long to let them talk and find ways to redirect the conversation into the areas you want to hear about. You can do this by asking them to tell you more about an aspect of the experience they are describing that might be more relevant to your research. Or you can let them finish and then move on to your next topic.

• You: How often do you buy things online?

• User: All the time. The last thing I bought was a sweater. I used to knit my own sweaters. Actually, I was really into wool and did a lot of experimenting with dyes. Did you know that you can make dyes from natural products? They are a lot better for you than the chemicals that most commercial sweaters are colored with. I even collect things from the woods. Like there are certain barks that you can boil to make really nice brown colors.

• You: That’s really interesting. Thanks for telling me about that. To come back to shopping, are you able to find knitted products that you like online?

If the person seems determined to avoid the topics you are interested in, that in itself might be an important piece of information, and you might want to take some time to find out why.

People May Have Reasons that are Not Obvious

During a user research session looking at women’s health information online, one participant decided to use our session as a chance to look up something that she wanted to know. She was so insistent that we decided to let her do it, but also asked her to tell us why this information was so important.

She told us that she had a question about a medical condition. She had not been able to find the answer and was worried. Her question had nothing to do with what we were testing, but it was hard to tell someone not to search for health information she really wanted. We were also interested in why she hadn’t been able to find the answer.

In the end, she took almost 10 minutes searching on different sites. She kept entering the same search terms, but finding nothing relevant. Finally, on one of the sites, something in the search results page gave her a clue.

She entered the term the site used—the medically correct word—and found the answer immediately.

In this case, it wasn’t that the participant was trying to avoid our tasks...she just had something else on her mind, and thought our usability test would be an opportunity to get the answer.

We learned something important about the problems she’d had using the search feature and a lot about how persistent patients can be in looking for information about their own medical conditions.

As you learn to handle these situations, keep focused on your research goals. Most of the time, you don’t want to go down a rabbit hole following a tangential story unless you are sure that there’s something interesting to be learned.

Create a structure that supports story collection

If you want to collect stories, you have to create a structure for your research sessions that allows the time for that to happen. One way to do this is to mix closed and open questions. You can start with simple questions that establish the topic and then ask a question that invites the person to give you more detail. For example, look at Table 6-1.

Table 6-1.  http://www.flickr.com/photos/rosenfeldmedia/4459992066/

A STRUCTURE FOR AN INTERVIEW
Do this...	Like this...
Start with a question that establishes the activity you want to talk about. This question can be simply answered with a yes or no.	“Have you ever [done something]?”
Then ask questions that build up a picture of how this activity fits into their work or life. You can even suggest answers from a standard list for these questions.	“How often do you [do that thing]?” “What makes you decide to [do that thing]?” “Would you say this is something you mostly do at work or at home?”
Now, ask a question to get them to think about a specific example.	“When was the last time you [did that thing]?”
Once they have a specific event in mind, you can repeat the situation, to be sure you have it right, and then ask for the whole story.	“Tell me about that.”

Sometimes, there is not much more to say about the event, but if there is, you have accomplished two goals: found answers for your basic questions and given the person a chance to give you a rich example of the context and situation.

Something else to remember is that people respond to their environment. If you are sitting in a conference room with a camera looking over your shoulder, taking notes on a clipboard with a list of questions on it, don’t be surprised if people respond by trying to answer each question as succinctly as possible.

If you want them to open up, they need things to react to. These can be your own products or prototypes, but they might also be all the things in their office or even a “stage set” of a home. Proctor & Gamble, for example, built a Future Home Lab, which was a house complete with a laundry room, kitchen, and living room (along with a focus group room), where they could talk to customers within a context similar to the one in which their products would be used. They felt that they could get more accurate information from research when people were reminded of “real life.” Something about being in a kitchen, for example, reminds people that it can be messy and wet and hot. Or having their kids with them reminds people of how busy and sometimes chaotic their lives can be.

Seeing it in Context Changes the Answer

Caroline Jarrett was asked to find out about an annual pack of materials that was sent to every employer in the UK—about 1.3 million packs, each of them an inch thick, containing a mixture of forms and guidance, including a set of 22 “help cards,” nicely printed in color on good-quality card stock.

The annual customer satisfaction survey rated the cards as “easy to use,” but I persuaded the agency to let me interview small business employers on their own premises. I took a pack with me, so we had realistic materials, and we were in a realistic setting—their actual offices.

The typical incident that became the story: one nice lady started leafing through the pack, setting aside the parts that weren’t relevant to her business (almost all of them). She got to the help cards: “Oh yes, these are really useful.” Myself: “That’s interesting. Could you go through those cards then and show me which one you used most recently? And if it’s not too much trouble, perhaps you could find your own copy from your filing system?” She rifled through the cards, looking thoughtful. A moment later, “Ah, I remember now. What I actually did was use the one from last year and changed this number here.”

The government was sending her 22 rather expensive pieces of recycling.

P.S. As a result, the whole pack was redesigned.

You won’t have any stories (or even story fragments, images, or great quotes) if you didn’t take good notes. There’s nothing more frustrating than to half-remember a story, but not be able to find it in all your observation notes. If you don’t capture this information in a retrievable way, you will never go back and get it later. The way you write your notes can help.

There must be an ideal world in which there is enough time for everything we want to do, but the realities of most project schedules make it hard to fit in anything “extra.” And the rich detail that you need for stories is often “extra.”

The most important place to start is by turning on your “juicy story” filter so you are ready to take notes on any exceptional stories that come along. These field notes don’t have to be elaborate—just enough to remind you of the story so you can go back and write down all the details later.

Anytime you take notes, you are making selections about what is worth writing down. It might seem possible to record a description without any interpretation at all, but even the decision about where to place a video camera eliminates some parts of the story and emphasizes others.

When you are taking notes, it’s very helpful to write down the real words. The specifics of terminology or expression can be key to a story. With the specific words, patterns or other realizations may emerge during later review of your notes that you would never see if you didn’t have those words. Look at these four notes about someone deleting something by accident.

The first situation describes the event, but includes no emotional or behavioral detail. The second adds a richer description of the entire event. The third and fourth provide a direct quote and an indication of the user’s level of emotion, showing a different level of intensity in the reaction to the situation.

Since you are probably not just listening for stories, but collecting a lot of other information at the same time, you need to organize your notes so that there is time and a place for notes that might lead to stories. Ginny Redish, the author of one of the first books on usability, suggests using a multi-column format, as shown in Figure 6-1. The first column is for your observations, and the second for inferences you draw from those observations. In the final column, you can easily record both quotes and notes on potentially good stories.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/rosenfeldmedia/4459198159/

Figure 6-1. Organizing your notes in columns (or marking them as you write them) makes it easier to find those insights that occur to you as you listen and observe, as well as the stories that might otherwise get lost.

Of course, you may be taking your notes in an electronic recording tool like Techsmith’s Morae or simply typing in a document or spreadsheet. If so, make two different markers for stories. You might use “Q” for a great verbatim quote and “S” for a possible story or word image. That way, it’s easy to find your story material among all the other notes and data that gets recorded, so that you can go back and listen to that part of the recording later.

You may not have time to write as much as the last example when you are taking notes “live,” but you will want to develop a note-taking style that lets you capture as much of the richness of the experience as possible. One place to start is by capturing as much of the real words as you can. Capturing exact words can also be a fast way to provide cues about details, like the level of domain knowledge, for example:

All of these techniques also work if you are taking notes by reviewing audio or video recordings. Whether you are watching the tapes for the first time or just going back over sessions or events where you were present, you still need to listen for the users’ own words and the way they tell their stories.

In this example, both users manage to close the window, but one uses technical language to describe her actions, while the other does not, suggesting very different relationships to the computer.

Another trick that helps make analysis easier is to write a summary of each person, pulling together all of your notes. A summary sheet might include the following information:

Put this into a structured format, and it will be easy to flip through your notes to find the stories. Figure 6-2 shows the basic template, and Figure 6-3 shows an example of a structured notes form.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/rosenfeldmedia/4459978466/

Figure 6-2. Template for structured notes.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/rosenfeldmedia/4459978562/

Figure 6-3. Example of structured notes.

This may seem like a lot of work, and you may not have time to do this for every participant on every research project. But when you can do this, it makes the analysis go much faster. It does something else, too. It gives you a chance to summarize the session while it is still fresh in your mind. You can get down on paper all the impressions that you took away from the session. In her writing on field studies, Judy Ramey calls this “collecting your head notes.” If you are working on a research team, it’s a good chance to pull everyone’s observations into one place. And it’s fodder for personas.

“Making by making strange: Defamiliarization and the design of domestic technologies,” G. Bell, M. Blythe, and P. Sengers, in ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI) 2005, Volume 12, Issue 2

“Methods for successful ‘Thinking-Out-Loud’ procedures,” Judy Ramey, in the STC Usability Toolkit: www.stcsig.org/usability/resources/toolkit/toolkit.html

Stories are all around us, if you just listen for them. The trick to getting good stories in your user research is to make the time for them.