Every story is told from at least one point of view. In user experience stories, there is no such thing as a neutral point of view. How you present the characters, context, and events of the story is part of the point. Change the perspective, and you change the story, shaping it to either work for a specific audience or make your point more clearly.

The story of the blind men and the elephant is a classic example of perspective and how it shapes what we experience.

In this story, each of the blind men touched a different part of the elephant, and came away with a different perspective. None of their experiences were wrong, but none of them reflected the entire elephant, either.

When you choose the perspective for a story, you are choosing a subset of all of the experiential possibilities. The perspective (or perspectives) you choose limits what the people in the story see and experience. This determines the information you give the audience—and, more important, what you don’t—and therefore changes their experience of the story.

One way to decide on a perspective is to consider the goals or attitudes you want the story to reflect. Imagine four people describing why they use an online bookstore:

Each of these perspectives could be the basis for a different story about using the site, reflecting different ideas about what this online bookstore is good for and how it fits into their lives.

So far, we don’t know much about these people. When we add character, we’ll add personal details like gender, culture, race, age, height, wealth, and social influence. Character affects perspective, of course, and the central character of a story can often be a shorthand way of thinking about perspective. But for now, stay focused on what story you want to tell and what perspective will help you make your point.

If you don’t think perspective matters, think about House, the popular TV medical drama. Each show is a detective story, as the doctors try to solve perplexing medical cases. There is a central character (Dr. House) and a patient. House’s medical colleagues are a set of supporting characters. Their goal is to find the bad guy (diagnose the patient’s condition correctly) and save the day. There is always one other set of characters: the patient’s relatives, who have to give permission for each (usually more and more dangerous) medical procedure. The stories in House are told from the perspective of the doctors: the disease is the enemy, and the relatives and hospital bureaucrats are barriers to be swept out of the way so they can (almost inevitably) save the day.

But what if we told these stories from the perspective of the relatives? They are worried, scared, and being asked to make life-and-death decisions instantly. They are pushed out of the way, bullied, and even lied to. For example, in one episode, House asks a colleague to call the patient’s mother pretending to be from the CDC, so that she will agree to a procedure. If we told these stories from the relatives’ perspective, House would be a very different show.

Adaptive Path did something like this when they designed their diabetes monitoring device (see Chapter 12). Instead of starting from the chemistry or from manufacturing requirements, they started from the experience of people with diabetes. That perspective changed the stories they told and the design they created.

You can use perspective in the same way in stories that explore the experiences of people who are new to technology or for whom the inner workings, language, and customs of computer use are new or unknown. You might show ways in which a product can be used that the designers and engineer never dreamed of. Used in this way, stories can help broaden the design vision.

Remember the story about a new parking technology from Chapter 10? That idea fell flat because it needed the perspective of an urban driver and the challenges of parallel parking to help it make sense. What if the researchers proposing that technology had given more weight to the parallel parking perspective instead of assuming that any and all would automatically see the value in it?

Your own relationship to the story affects your choice of perspective

In Chapter 12, we talked about your relationship to the audience and to the story. When your story is about user experience work, you are a part of the story because you were there to collect it. You have to decide how to include your own perceptions, if at all.

Ethnographers, who may spend long periods of time in the setting of a story, always have to wrestle with this question. In Tales of the Field: On Writing Ethnography, John Van Mannen identifies three genres of storytelling for writing ethnography based on different relationships between the storyteller and the audience, which shape the structure of the story. His three genres are realist, confessional, and impressionist tales.

Realist tales

Realist tales are stories told in third person with the author largely absent from the finished text. This means that the narrative centers on reporting what the people in the narrative did, said, or thought. It’s a documentary format, focused on concrete references. There is an implicit claim to authority—that the events described in the story really happened or might really happen.

Realist tales are useful as a way to document context of use or to create a story to describe typical events or activities. Most persona stories are written in this matter-of-fact style. They may have some detail, but primarily focus on activities and interaction rather than emotion.

This example of a realist story describes a simple context and shows the main character using an interactive system to solve a problem.

Waiting For the Bus

There is nothing more frustrating than waiting for a bus in the snow and not knowing whether you are late or the bus is. Sandra didn’t like snow much anyway, but she liked standing at the bus stop even less. She was pretty sure she was on time, but on her route, the bus sometimes got ahead of the published schedule. After she’d waited for a few minutes, she brushed enough snow off the sign to be able to read the stop number. She had the RideFind number in her contact list, so all she had to do was enter the number of the bus stop into a text message. A couple of seconds later, the reply came back. The bus was 10 minutes away, running late. She’d get to work this morning.

Confessional tales

Confessional tales are stories told in first person, which are focused on the experience of the author. As a report on research, this style most explicitly acknowledges the author’s role in the work—selecting the people to work with, what to observe, and how much weight to give to various informants and observations.

These tales are a way to share experiences: what you learned, ideas about the design process, and (perhaps) how you overcame problems. Many of the stories in this book are in this style. The story Seeing the Business from their Point of View in Chapter 12 uses a confessional style to create a bridge between client and developer perspectives. By speaking directly from personal experience, these stories can help you connect directly to your audience. They can also be a disarming way to share insights, by framing them as things that surprised you.

Lou Rosenfeld’s story, A Story Can Give You Time, in Chapter 15, about getting a team to work together is an example of a confessional tale. Instead of trying to describe what the people within the client company were thinking, he told the story from his own perspective. This genre can be a useful way to introduce yourself to a new audience and make a connection to them.

Telling the Story of How I Got There

Despite my passion for the subject, when I speak to groups about accessibility, I always feel like a newcomer to the field. So many others have been working in it for so much longer, and know so much more.

One year, I gave the opening talk at Knowbility’s Access U conference. Everyone in the audience was there because they wanted to learn about how to make Web sites and other technology more accessible. I didn’t need to convince them about the importance of accessibility, but I did want to talk about why it’s important that the access be usable. Instead of diving into the “what and why” of usability, I started by telling the story of how I became an accessibility advocate.

It was a story about connecting the dots. I told them about three things that had happened to me and how they made the connection between my work and accessibility. By making the story personal, I didn’t have to claim that everyone should follow the same path. By making the story personal, I could include topics that they might not think of as part of accessibility, and show why they were. And I didn’t run the risk of criticizing the pioneers, because all I was doing was telling them how / got there.

This might seem like a risky strategy. After all, if you are an expert, shouldn’t you be sharing that expertise, not your own problems and personal experiences? Perhaps. But you may find that telling the story through your own perspective can be a good way to acknowledge the difficulty of the topic and show the audience that they can come through the challenges to insights.

Impressionist tales

Impressionist tales mix a description of events with a strong story structure. As Van Mannen describes it, this genre holds back on interpretations “Saying, in effect, ‘here is this world, make of it what you will.’... The intention is not to tell readers what to think of an experience, but to show them the experience from beginning to end and thus draw them immediately into the story to work out its problems and puzzles as they unfold.”

Impressionist tales are intended to spark ideas and actions in the readers, just as user experience stories can be the starting point for a design idea. They might start with the context of the story, perhaps including your position as an observer, but then move into a more dramatic re-telling of the events. These stories can have an ending, but might also end with an explicit or implicit question.

This impressionist story describes a missed business meeting. It draws no conclusions, but might suggest a few ideas about the people in the story. This story is told in first person, as though it is a recounting of a story as it was told to you. Third person works just as well.

Missing the Meeting

I work for a small consulting company. If you’ve ever worked in that environment, you’ll know that one of the most important events is the big meeting with a potential new client. These meetings are the culmination of a lot of work, and can represent a big chunk of future income.

One January, the head of the company was scheduled for “A Big Meeting” a few hours from our office. We came in and made sure everything was ready. During the morning, it started to snow. Hard.

The traffic and weather reports started to sound dangerous, with accidents reported on the highways. “Cancel,” we said. “No point risking the drive.” But the boss decided to push ahead. “Have to show we are dedicated.”

Presentation. Check. Company profile folders. Check. Boots. Check. And off he went. He left an hour early, just to be sure.

Forty-five minutes later, he called. He’d fishtailed into a snowdrift, and would we please call a tow truck and tell them he’d be late to the meeting.

We dialed the number, ready to tell them that the boss would be there, if a little late. Really. The phone rang through to the receptionist. “Sorry,” she said. “He’s left for the day. With all this snow, he decided the safest thing to do was to leave his car in the city and take the train home early.”

Oops. We were so focused on getting to the meeting that we had forgotten that other people might go home early when it snows hard.

How to add perspective

The most common way of adding perspective is by having the main character of your story do the talking. What this character says will then frame the main points in the story. This is because every character represents a different set of life experiences.

HSBC runs a series of ads based on point of view. They pair images with words describing different reactions to them. For example, a backpack might represent adventure, fear, or debt. Or a single word—“security”—might be explored through multiple images: an island compound, a teddy bear, and a password field. Each of the images suggests a story with different characters and different experiences. The message of the ads is that there are many different perspectives, and (implicitly) that you need a bank that understands them all. You can see the ads on their Web site, Your Point of View (www.yourpointofview.com).

Changes in perspective can also suggest different needs that a new design can meet. For example, one character might describe a nighttime scene as dark and ominous, while a different character might see that same scene as quiet and peaceful. If you were telling a story to explore a mobile phone for the first perspective, you might want features like a bright backlight that could be used as a flashlight and perhaps add a special-purpose emergency call button. The second perspective might suggest quick-and-easy control of ringtone volume to avoid disturbing the peaceful surroundings.

Another way to add perspective is to create an unexpected situation or context. The contrast between the expected story and the one you choose to tell creates a new perspective on the experience. Television ads use this technique because it makes the ads (and therefore hopefully the products) more memorable. A good example of this is a UK television ad for the Honda CR-V from many years ago. Narrated by Garrison Keillor, of the long-running radio show, Prairie Home Companion, the ad shows vehicles and people jumping out and around a car, while the driver avoids both them and the street maintenance work. The narrator talks about how adventurous one has to be because of this accepted way of life “in one of the most inhospitable places on earth.” However, intercut with these images is a scene of an assembling audience watching the movie of the same driving images. The movie is being shown outdoors on the side of a building in rugged terrain, and the audience appears to be farm workers in Mexico or South America. They smile and laugh at the crazy European scene of cars and trucks barely missing each other. The ad creates a strong contrast between the perspective of people in Orpington, UK and those farm workers about what a really inhospitable place is (www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_gEqCcoh80).

As we said in Chapter 12, when you are crafting a story, you start with the audience. Their relationship to the story, and your purpose in telling them the story, are an important part of your perspective.

The Lion’s Story

There was a father who always told his son the same story every night. It was a story about a lion who hunted an antelope, and the antelope always outsmarted the lion. After hearing the same story every night, night after night, finally the child stopped his father and asked, “When does the lion win?” The father put the book down and said, “The lion will win when the lion tells the story.”—African proverb

A character is a person (or other animate object) in a story. “Character” also refers to the defining traits of those people. It’s the second meaning that concerns us most. Those characteristics distinguish a well-drawn persona from an actor in a use case, and help us understand the character’s motivations, preferences, and goals.

One of the reasons stories are so useful in user experience design is that they add specificity and texture to the one-dimensional views of users that we often see. You can make your characters vivid by how you describe them. For example:

In one sentence, you already have some clear ideas about this person’s attitude toward life. The choice of character can help you shape the story by having the character’s actions support, or contradict, expectations. You can make the audience feel comfortable by using familiar types or create tension by using unusual or disquieting attributes.

These should not be whimsical decisions, but careful choices to help craft the story. In most situations, you will want to base your characters on data or on stories you have collected. This is especially true if you are making an unexpected choice.

One exception to this rule is when you deliberately choose an unlikely character. We chose Sister Sarah for the story about finding a car in a large parking lot because she was an unlikely choice. She reminds us that even those we might not think of as technologically savvy have day-to-day problems that our products can solve.

Another good use of character traits is to highlight the needs of people outside the mainstream: those with less economic means, or who come from a different ethnic culture or geographic location, or who have disabilities. When these characteristics are just part of a character, instead of the central point, they can open the door to thinking about a wider vision of “the user.”

The careful use of character attributes can also help address perspectives of the design team by bringing to the surface the diversity of the team itself. For example, everyone will have different feelings about baseball games: they may love them, hate them, or have never been to a baseball game at all. But that doesn’t mean you can’t tell a story about someone whose key characteristic is a love for the game. If you have multiple characters, you can distribute their interests so that everyone on the team has someone to root for.

Context is the environment for the story. It’s the stuff that connects to and surrounds the central core of the story. Some context is explicitly stated by the storyteller and some of it is inferred by the audience. Context is also the what, when, and where of the events in the story.

The story itself might be quite simple:

There isn’t much to these simple ideas for stories. But they can be combined with contexts to become the seeds of epic tales of love, battle, mystery, or discovery. It’s all a matter of context.

Not a bad start.

A user experience story may not start so dramatically, but it still needs a context to build on. You can build context in just a few words, letting the audience fill in the details. All stories rely on our ability to fill in the blanks.

As with character, the details you leave out are just as important as what you put in. While there are no hard and fast guidelines about what to leave out, consider leaving out noncritical details that might be fun for the audience to fill in for themselves. For instance, when telling a story about a dog, you probably want to make sure you’re clear that the animal is a dog. But you might not have to mention the breed of dog. This would allow the audience to fill in this detail themselves, possibly with the breed of their own dogs.

Mi Casa Es Su Casa

I used to teach scriptwriting for multimedia in an EU program in Lisbon. In that program, half of the 20 or so students were Portuguese and the other half were from countries all over Europe. In the context section of the class, I would tell a story about my cat when I was a kid. The main part of the story described an event that took all of about three seconds in real time, but I surrounded it with explicit and implicit context, which made the whole story last about 12 minutes.

At the end of the story, I asked the students questions like, “What did my house look like? What did my living room look like? What did my bedroom look like? How was the furniture arranged in my bedroom?” They all had clear answers to these questions, though I described none of these details in the story. Furthermore, when describing my house, to the Swedes my house looked Swedish, to the Germans my house looked German, to the Spanish my house looked Spanish. I told them they were all correct.

When you set the context for a story, you can use those assumptions to keep the story short, focusing on the details that are important to the point of the story. Here’s an example that Kevin uses in his workshops.

What have you learned about the context from this opening to a story?

In this story so far, there is a strong context of time, but no specific place. The audience can fill in the place with their own experience, be it Detroit, Los Angeles, London, or Amsterdam. And when filled in with their own details, the story becomes more interesting and more relevant to them.

Context exercise

This is a version of an exercise that Kevin uses in his storytelling workshops.

1. Before the workshop, gather a collection of small objects. Look for common, insignificant objects that one might step over in the street: a small stone, a dried leaf, or a bottle cap.

2. Put people in pairs and give each of them one of the objects.

3. Each person has three minutes to use as many types of context as they can to tell a short story featuring the object.

These stories won’t be perfect in just three minutes. The point is to learn to weave elements of the environment into the story.

As you get more practice, you can expand this exercise by thinking about some of the common items in the environment of your story. When you are out in the field, collect contextual details to weave into your stories later.

Here’s an example that includes a number of different forms of context.

Dialing the Phone

When I worked for Motorola Labs ^PHYSICAL, there were periods of time when my job included improving the user experience for mobile phones: How might they be easier to use? What new functions might they perform? How might it be easier to call someone?

I remember, back when I was a kid ^HISTORICAL, I had to memorize my home telephone number, which started with Kingsley 5, or KI5. Because I would often take the bus downtown by myself to where my mother worked, I had to know how to call home in case of an emergency. So I memorized the numbers of my phone number, but that’s not all I memorized.

What is also recorded deep in my being is how it felt to call home ^MEMORY. When you use a rotary dial, every number has its own rhythm. No matter how well you knew the number, you could only dial it so fast because the phone needed to express the number in its own time.

I’d put my finger in the holes and rotate clockwise as fast as I could, feeling the weight of the dial push back on my finger ^{SENSORY: TEXTURE.} But the dialing didn’t actually happen until I pulled my finger out of the hole and let the dial recoil back. The number 2 in my phone number was quick. But the number 9 in my phone number required almost a complete turn of my skinny little finger and took forever to recoil, while I had to wait and listen to every tick—tick-tick ^{SENSORY: SOUND}. It’s not so much that I dialed the number, but that the phone and I dialed together. It was collaborative.

The nature of dialing reinforced the number in my kinesthetic and auditory memory. I knew three interwoven forms of my phone number and every phone number. How can we build that interwoven reinforcing of a sensual experience of 40 years ago into modern technology?

A well-defined context, a good beginning, middle, and end, interesting characters, and good timing are all important elements of a story, but as a story unfolds before an audience, all of these ingredients are really there to support the images the story leaves in the audience’s mind. Listeners can forgive a lot of missing details and bad timing if there are good images.

You might think of imagery as visual pictures. Some types of multimedia storytelling can use actual images to tell part of the story. You can create images with words, too.

In performance storytelling, these images help make people laugh, cry, or think when they hear an effective story. It is the strong imagery in a story that makes them see the world differently. Even if all a story has is images, it would be almost complete. In the next chapter on story structures, there’s a description of a type of story that is all images.

Perhaps you think that imagery has no place in a business story. Not so. One of the easiest ways to see the role of imagery in business stories is to look at vision stories. Annette Simmons is a business consultant who uses story as a basic element of her practice (http://groupprocessconsulting.com). In her book Whoever Tells the Best Story Wins, she describes a vision story as one that “raises your gaze from current difficulties to a future payoff that successfully competes with the temptation to give up, compromise, or change direction.” This involves building an image of a critical moment or critical need, where the hunger for the vision is first created, then the vision supplied. Here is one example.

They Don’t Leave One of their Own Behind

The robotics company iRobot tells a vision story around one of their products, the PackBot. (http://irobot.com/sp.cfm?pageid=171)

PackBot is a small tank-like robot designed to venture into places that would be dangerous for people, and then send back pictures or do simple mechanical tasks, all under remote control. PackBot is a complicated piece of machinery, developed over the course of many years by a large team of engineers. As with any piece of machinery, its development has included a fair share of challenges and frustrations.

One place it’s being used is in war zones where there’s a danger of unexploded bombs. One group of soldiers named their PackBot Scooby-Doo. After performing its duties admirably by detecting a number of unexploded ordinances, Scooby-Doo is now on display at iRobot headquarters. Destroyed by a bomb it was looking for, the soldiers carefully collected all its pieces and brought them back. They don’t leave one of their own behind.

Scooby-Doo now sits in the company lobby, in pieces, as a reminder that this could have happened to a human being instead. So in meeting the ongoing engineering challenges and addressing the inevitable frustrations, ultimately what iRobot employees are doing is saving human lives. And Scooby-Doo reminds them of this as they enter the building everyday.

iRobot tells this vision story to every new employee, at internal and external company events and to a multitude of company visitors ranging from school children to the upper echelons of government. The images it leaves are powerful, even without physically seeing the robot. Images are the stuff that the audience imagines as they listen to the words and events of the story. You can help them along by providing some of the images.

We’ve been talking about words used for images, but we need to say a few words about the language of the story itself. You want your stories to sound natural as you tell them (or as people read them) and to be authentic to the experience they are about. Here are a few suggestions.

When you are constructing a story, choose the ingredients that will support the story and connect to the audience appropriately.

None of these are extra—they are what makes something a story and not just a chronological report. They carry information that helps the audience understand the story and make it their own, by better engaging their brains.

As you decide on the right mix, consider these questions:

These ingredients—perspective, character, context, imagery, and language—support the events and make the story come alive in the minds of the audience, thereby creating the experience of the story.

The ingredients of a story are tools you can use to give your story meaning and texture. They are the following: