Janice (Ginny) Redish has been actively doing user experience design since long before it took on that name. Ginny’s books on usability testing (with Joe Dumas) and on user and task analysis (with JoAnn Hackos) have helped many practitioners hone their skills in user research. Her most recent book is Letting Go of the Words—Writing Web Content that Works, published by Morgan Kaufmann.
I’ve been talking about stories and scenarios—and how useful and powerful they are—for a long time. And I’ve been wishing for a book that would both make the case for stories in user experience and help us all become better at collecting, crafting, telling, and using stories in our work
Well, here it is. You are holding a book that combines the stories and skills of a professional storyteller who designs user experiences and a user experience designer who tells stories.
Just as personas make users come alive for user experience designers, stories make users’ lives real. User experience design is about experience. Stories are those experiences.
As Kevin and Whitney say in this book: We all hear stories. We all tell stories—every day in all parts of our lives. What happened in school today? What happened at work today? How did you manage that? What would you do if...?
As Kevin and Whitney also say, you are probably already hearing stories in the user research that you do. If you write scenarios for design or for usability testing, you are already telling stories. This book will help you do what you are doing—even better.
Stories are immensely powerful, as I realized many years ago on a project to help an airline company understand what happens in travel agencies. For four months, a colleague and I crisscrossed the U.S., spending several hours in each of many types of travel agencies around the country. We watched and listened as travel agents took calls, helped walk-in customers, and told us about their other clients.
When we sifted through our notes back at our hotel at the end of each day, we found ourselves reminding each other of the stories we had heard and seen. Part of the drama in those stories was in the life of the traveler: The father who had promised his daughter that their trip to Disneyland would include renting a red Mustang convertible... The gal who wanted to visit her boyfriend for a weekend but needed a cheap fare... The reporter who had to get to the scene of a disaster in another state immediately... The family planning a once-in-a-lifetime trip to France...
The other part of the drama in those stories was in the work of the travel agents, especially in how difficult it was for them to meet these customers’ needs with their current software.
When we reported our findings to the client, we had facts. We had numbers. We had flowcharts. And we had stories—lots of stories. It was the stories that people remembered. It was the stories that became the focal points for innovation in the software.
I wish I’d had this book when doing the project with the travel agents—and for many projects after that. This book will help you become a better story collector, story crafter, story teller, story user—all in the context of your work in user experience design.
The examples (yes, lots of stories, as you’d expect) and the direct, clear advice will help you become
a better listener, so you have users’ words to tell their stories
a better observer, so you can include the real context of use in your stories
an ethical storyteller, knowing how to craft stories (like personas) that are archetypically true even if they are composites
an innovative designer, using stories to help teams see problems and solutions in new ways
a person who people enjoy listening to because your stories are both interesting and meaningful for your projects
Have fun!
—Ginny Redish