Everything about UX stems from ideation and experience. It is no longer enough to provide data, it is required to attach a narrative to the information. This helps create impact and engagement. Storytelling in UX is including the process of ideation and experience into the design process, in the expectation that it meets the consumer demand. In this blog, we will dive deep into its importance, advantages, and more.
What are stories?
Stories as a form of entertainment. We don’t need to deep dive and figure out what it means. In simple terms, it is a communication tool. Storytelling helps us break the information and take us to a virtual world and understand it in our own way.
Advantages of Storytelling:
- Users are likely to remember the things included in the story.
- Users always feel like they are the heroes of the story.
- Stories can motivate users.
- Easy way to communicate complex problems.
- Trigger points and touch points are understood with the help of emotions.
- Create a feeling of connectedness.
Explaining underlying ideas.
Understanding and conveying the vision and mission.
Is storytelling a new UX methodology?
No. It is not a new methodology or technology. Whether you believe in UCD (User-centric Approach) or goals based design, or technical approaches like domain-based design, stories have a place in your work. Stories are part of all user experience activities and we cannot separate storytelling and user experience.
Types of stories in UX design?
Stories can be a naturalistic and blended way of communicating. Stories are an effective way of engaging the user and helping people remember, User experience includes a different variety of disciplines, each one has its own perspectives. Stories connect different languages when you bring it to your work. By providing related examples.
• Stories can describe a context or situation.
• Stories can illustrate problems.
• Stories can be a starting point for all design discussions.
• Stories can explore design concepts.
• Stories can explain the impact of a new design approach.
How does Storytelling work in UX Design?
1. Good stories always captivate audiences. In user experience (UX) design, designers use storytelling throughout the design process to ensure that all work focuses on the user’s needs and the value you want to give those users.
2. Storyboard is an experience. Storyboards can help us visualize, illustrate ideas, and emotional elements to use for user experience-related strategy and communications.
3. When a product tells a story, users easily learn how and why to use it. Your products might have a ‘Voice’ and flow toward the user goals, creating and unfolding stories that users create for themselves.
4. Once we complete the research part, to understand the user’s needs and wants, that time we can use our research insights to tell a story about who your users are and what their needs are, and how we can solve them. When we have a story at this point it is easy for everyone to get involved in the project to understand the users and match their requirements.
How Does Storytelling Help Pitch a UX Design?
Before we get into how we can use storytelling, let’s take a moment to understand the ways in which storytelling can help communicate ideas.
- Craft Better Personas.
- Using Journey Maps to Understand Problems.
- Use Research and Data.
- To Find User Opinions.
- Building Better Wireframes.
These all are the main Elements of storytelling?
You can use these elements to create your storylines:
Setting: What is the world of my story?
Characters: Who are the characters?
Problem: (and Goal). What can go wrong? What problem will my character need to solve?
Engage: How does the user start to follow his goal?
Escalate: How can it get more difficult? What obstacles will he/she face?
Lose: What are the final outputs? and how can it fail?
Turn: How can I turn the loss into a win? How does the character solve the problem?
Okay, let’s think about the UX design process with movie creation.
Yes. We can relate the storytelling with movies. Basically, when we drill down into movie creation, it’s easy to understand how the directors are framing the scenes, characters, and narrations.
Example:
Director — UX designers and Product owners.
Audience — Users
Characters — User Persona’s
Events inside stories — User journey and user flows
Main characters/Goals and motivation (Hero) — Users need and Wants
Triggers (Turning Point) — First touchpoint
Obstacles (Villans) — User pain points and problems
Climax — Problem really solved or not through the solutions
Conclusion:
Storytelling is a skill that anyone can learn easily. It’s a mandatory skill for every designer. From my experience storytelling helps our audience members put themselves in the shoes of our users. When they think from their perspective, they have more related information to make a final decision and it helps the user and as well as the business.
