Storytelling

Aha moments: insights in what someone doesn't say

2010-01-28T13:29:32Z

We put out a call for stories of "aha" moments during user research, when something observed in the context illuminates an entire aspect of experience. Nancy Frishberg sent us this story. It's a wonderful example of how people may not call attention to adjustments they have made in their environment.

Here's Nancy's story:

I did a series of home visits with people who had been diagnosed with a particular chronic illness. This illness causes joint inflammation, painful movement and fatigue among other symptoms, and can be controlled with various medications (and perhaps by diet).
I was investigating questions about how the illness affected the person's work life, family life, participation in social activities, whether any regular activities had been curtailed, and what changes the doctor recommended to the drug regimen or diet or other adjustments.

I worked with one woman who had been living with the illness for at least 7 years. Throughout our time together, she told me that the illness had little or no effect on her activities, and that she was healthy for all external purposes. Instead, we talked about our mutual enjoyment of the movies and she described a recent reunion with high school girlfriends, now all approaching retirement.

She owned a hairdressing studio, and felt responsibility to her (aging) customers to continue to provide them with service, though her husband had already retired. Her customers didn't know the extent of her illness, but just that she had aches and pains from time to time.

On my last visit with her, she asked if she could blow out my hair. I thought about it, and couldn't figure out why not. I hadn't taken the time to do anything other than let my chin-length straight hair air-dry. So we spent the final 20 minutes of our visit with her styling my hair.

Where's the aha?
She stood, while I sat. She used an ionic brush, an electronic dryer that looked something like this - different from the ones I'm used to. http://www.conair.com/images/hc_bc171cs.jpg

She worked with both hands: The dominant hand holds the dryer-brush for blowing warm air, shaping of the section of hair at the same time, while the non-dominant hand uses the tail of a comb to separate out sections of the hair for attention.

What's most noteworthy is that the device is about half the weight of an ordinary hair dryer (1.1lbs vs 2-3 lbs), which means that she had figured out a way to continue her work while reducing the physical demands of holding a heavy device.

She did not make any verbal reference to the difference in effort, but merely recommended that I might like to try this device at home, and that it was her favorite at the salon as well.

Stories pack information into tight spaces

2010-01-24T23:48:42Z

One of the values of using stories is how much information they can pack into a few words. The IBM Knowledge Socialization Project has an example:

"My sister-in-law went shopping at Nordstrom's
at Christmas time. Later, they discovered that their
packages had been lost or stolen...."

Look at how much information is packed into this short story fragment. Their web site has a list of facts that are either explicit, or implicit.

Some are simple, like the basics of the plot: shopping, Nordstrom's, December.
Others look at the implications of the facts in the story: she was not held up at gunpoint (because they discovered the loss later).
Still others are cultural implications: She is shopping for Christmas presents (and celebrates Christmas). She is relatively well off (Nordstrom's is a high-end department store).
Or communicate relationships: I am married, and communicate with my sister-in-law.

I re-created this exercise in my chapter on "Narrative and Storytelling" in John Pruitt and Tamara Adlin's The Personas Lifecycle. I used this 53 word story fragment based on the book's running case study:

Tanner was deep into a Skatepunkz game-all the way up to level 12-- when he got a buddy message from his friend Steve with a question about his homework. He looked up with a start. Almost bedtime and his homework was still not done. Mom or Dad would be in any minute....

If you deconstruct this story, a lot of the cues are based on implicit cultural messages about the structure of families and the use of technology.

He's a kid (he has a bedtime)
He'd good at games (level 12)
He has regular access to a computer and to the internet (budy message)
He has some privacy (Mom or Dad would be in any minute)
But he also has rules (bedtime, homework)

For even shorter stories, there are several sites (and books) with 6-word stories.

There are compressed plots like these two from sixwordstories.net: "Fat. Drugs. Skinny. Rehab. ...Fat again." - Rustan Crane or "Coma. 20 years. Awake! Divorced...Suicide" Ben Ng (On sixwordstories.net)

Some are juxtapositions that suggest the events that led up to them. The most famous is from Ernest Hemingway: "For sale, baby shoes. Never used." Other examples of this sub-genre are: "Indian engineer in America; drives taxis," "She left for another. Incentives mattered," or "Seeking ride to New York, one way." (All on Marginal Revolution)

There are now several books of 6-word memoirs. You can see a collection of them from famous and obscure writers in the video on Smith Magazine - scroll down to the bottom of the right column.

Some try to tell a whole story, not just hint at one:

"How does lunch sound?" "Lovely." "Perfect."

There are a lot of sites with collections of these stories. As you read, it's hard not to think about how much information is packed into each of them.

How about a collection of 6-word stories on user experience?

"Click. Back. Click. Back. Next site."

"Great suggestions. Just what I want."

Add yours in the comments.

Tell stories. Eat more broccoli.

2010-01-04T22:16:06Z

Researchers at St. Louis University have been investigating whether topics as important as mammography, colorectal cancer risk reduction, and general cancer education can be improved with storytelling.

One of the challenges in healthcare today is to reduce what folks in public health call "disparities" - the tendency for African-Americans and other ethnic minorities to get sick more often, get less effective healthcare when they do get sick, and to be less knowledgeable about how to prevent illness.

So, the Center for Cultural Cancer Communication wanted to know what whether they could create more effective health communication. In an area of St. Louis that sees twice the expected number of late-stage breast cancers, they tried using storytelling.

It's not just that the information was in the form of a story. They captured on videotape the stories of 80 African-American breast cancer. So the stories were real. They were personal. And they were in the women's own language. They incorporated images, fact, and expressions of cultural norms and beliefs.

The results aren't surprising to anyone who has tried stories as a way of sharing information:

When videos included stories, people were more engaged. In fact, the longer the video lasted, the stronger the effect of stories.

Women who saw information about mammograms that included personal narratives were more likely to plan to get a mammogram themselves. And more of them actually did.

3 months later, they still remembered the key messages and still felt the emotions of the video: proud, inspired, sad and worried.

If stories can help increase the number of women who take the time to get mammograms by 50% (up from 54.5% to 75.6%), or double how many fruits and vegetables people eat (from 0.59 to 0.96 servings per day), just think what they can do for your user experience projects.

You can learn more about the Center for Cultural Cancer Communication, which was funded by the National Cancer Institute, at http://cancercontrol.cancer.gov/hcirb/ceccr/ceccrs_saintlouis.html.

Thanks to Cindy Lollar for telling me about this project.

"The single, most powerful communications tool you have"

2009-12-29T16:26:38Z

That's a quote from Andy Goodman in a talk on storytelling as a way to communicate the value of a non-profit's work. It's the story of changing a presentation from facts, figures and tiny print to a story. It's not that facts and figures aren't important. Or that you don't have to have the data to back up your work. It's that you need to start with something that lets the audience understand the result before you launch into how you got there.

The story he tells is about an organization that changes the lives of young people through their programs. But it could just as easily be about how a new design idea will change the experience.

How often have you heard a presentation that started with something like "if we deploy a new content management system with semantic tagging, we can enable a fully personalized experience"?

There's a place for discussing the technologies and techniques that make our ideas possible. But, if you are trying to explore a new idea, start with a story about the world it will create. Once the audience is excited about the idea, you can back up and talk about what it will take to make the idea happen.

Goodman's newsletter, free-range thinking, has a report on a study by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University. It compared the impact of two charitable appeals. One started with facts and figures, the other with the story of one child.

Which one would appeal more to you?

One:

Food shortages in Malawi are affecting more than three million children. In Zambia, severe rainfall deﬁcits have resulted in a 42 percent drop in maize production from 2000. As a result, an estimated three million Zambians face hunger.

Four million Angolans--one third of the population--have been forced to ﬂee their homes. More than 11 million people in Ethiopia need immediate food assistance.

Two:

Any money that you donate will go to Rokia, a 7-year-old girl from Mali, Africa. Rokia is desperately poor, and faces a threat of severe hunger or even starvation. Her life will be changed for the better as a result of your ﬁnancial gift. With your support, and the support
of other caring sponsors, Save the Children will work with Rokia's family and other members of the community to help feed her, provide her with education, as well as basic medical care and hygiene education.

In the study, the second was more effective. People who saw the Rokia's story (and a photo) donated almost twice as much money. A story - a recognizable person to donate to - is more compelling than what the authors call "statistical victims."

This sounds a lot like what makes personas work. Even though a persona is a composite person rather than a single, real, example, the principle is the same: It's easier to connect to a story than to statistics.

See the video of Andy Goodman's speech
Read Sympathy and Callousness: The impact of deliberative thought on donations to identifiable and statistical victims, by Deborah Small, George Lowenstein, Paul Slovic

Special thanks to Ginny Redish for pointing me to this resource.

Starting with Structure - Tomato Paste

2009-12-05T03:45:23Z

I am blessed with an embarrassment of riches when it comes to storytelling support in the Boston, MA area. There are a number of different organizations, gatherings and venues, one of which is MassMouth. This fall MassMouth started running Story Slams, which are like poetry slams loosely based on The Moth model. In Story Slams, storytellers have 5 minutes to tell a story on the topic of the evening, which is announced weeks ahead of time. Then the stories are judged by a panel of 3 groups of 3 judges each (9 total), Olympic diver style. On Nov 24th the slam topic was "Eating Disasters" and I was a judge that night. I was also asked to tell a "featured" story that was not to be judged. Judith Black, one of the other judges, started off the evening with a kick-ass story about eating in her family. In the second half of the evening, I told this story called Tomato Paste.

I am not naturally good at telling 5 minute stories. I studied under the Brother Blue model, which means that my stories start at about 8 minutes and get longer from there. In the previous month's story slam I competed with what I thought was a 5 minute story - it went about 6:10. Yep, you get points taken off for going too long. So even though I wasn't competing in November, I wanted this story to be better. The funny thing was that I made up just the outline of the story that afternoon. While I normally write out each story, this one only had an outline of 3 short sentences. I actually made up most of the ending while on stage in front of the audience. I've since written out the story and included it in chapter 14 of the book, along with a bit of structural deconstruction. In the video, you can see hints of me working out the story as I tell it.

TOMATO PASTE

Where books come to life

2009-12-04T16:27:05Z

It all started with this tweet from storytelling maven Tim Sheppard

The power of story, brought to life. Caution: may cause heart attacks in archivists & librarians.

The link points to a YouTube video called "Going West."

Dramatic reading? Animation? Who knows. It seems to live at the center of the connection between written stories, oral stories and multimedia?

It's from the New Zealand Book Council

Like no other human activity reading opens up our imagination. It enables us to understand those around us. It allows us to project the future and reach back into the past. Reading can entertain, challenge and educate. We believe that reading can transform people's lives.

Our mission is to inspire more New Zealanders to read more; to promote reading in general, but particularly to represent and promote New Zealand writing and writers - our own artists, stories and points of view.

It's not the medium... it's the story.

Can technology kill storytelling?

2009-11-21T20:34:57Z

Someone sent me an article that suggested that "The Internet is Killing Storytelling." The author contents that no one can think in more than 140 characters any more, and that the skills needed to create and listen to an extended narrative are disappearing.

"...the primary victim of this radically reduced attention span [is]the narrative, the long-form story, the tale. Like some endangered species, the story now needs defending from the threat of extinction in a radically changed and inhospitable digital environment." Paradoxically, there has never been a greater hunger for narrative, for stories that give shape and meaning to experience."

Even as he bemoans the demise of narrative, Ben Macintyre finds signs of life in Japanese thumb novels, or keitai shosetsu. There are book readers for the iPhone, and Amazon claims that people buy more books after they get a Kindle than before.

Can something as basic as sharing a story really be killed off so easily?

Stories have survived the invention of writing, the printed book, movies, animation, and even hypertext. The form may change, but I'm betting that we will keep finding ways to include stories in our lives.

Brother Blue, Storyteller

2009-11-07T17:25:13Z

Brother Blue, a legendary figure in storytelling, died on December 3. He was the center of a community of storytellers in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for over 20 years. Kevin Brooks and Laura Packer call him the father of modern storytelling.

"His stories always allowed the listener to imagine bigger worlds, see themselves in the heart of the tale and believe that they, too, were storytellers. Brother Blue said that he told stories, "from the middle of the middle of me to the middle of the middle of you," and that if you heard another person's story you could never harm them, so stories could save the world. He never stopped telling stories. -- From his obituary

Obituary from WBUR, with a link to Brother Blue and his wife Ruth on Storycorps

Story in the Boston Globe

Video clip from NECN, with video of Brother Blue, and an interview with Kevin and Laura

Stories and comments on Wicked Local Cambridge

A storied career

2009-06-15T23:52:47Z

Kathy Hansen's blog, A Storied Career, has links to all things about organizational storytelling. Her topics range from "storytelling and change" to "storytelling and social media" to a wonderful collection of quotations about stories and storytelling.

And, she interviews story practitioners on how they apply storytelling to their own work. I was tickled to be one of those practitioners and to find myself in the company of people like Annette Simmons (author of The Story Factor and Whoever Tells the Best Story Wins).

- Whitney

UX Book Salon at UPA 2009 in Portland

2009-06-04T01:49:10Z

Want to talk about storytelling? We always do, so we're taking an hour out of the UPA conference in Portland to invite folks to a UX Book Salon on Thursday morning at 8:30.

We're looking forward to a lively conversation about how we use stories in our practice. Personas, presentations, or analysing participants. What works? What doesn't? What have you been dying to try? Bring your stories and lets compare our experiences.

Contact Lou or Whitney at the conference for details of where to meet.
Or follow the conversation @rosenfeldmedia on Twitter

What kind of story is this?

2009-02-27T00:09:44Z

One of my favorite radio programs is This American Life. Each week, it collects a few stories on a theme, looking from a few, often offbeat, perspectives. These are examples of fantastic storytelling, masterminded by Ira Glass. You can hear him talk about how he approaches his work in a video from GEL 2007.

As much as I love them, I simply don't know how to describe these stories.

They are not "news stories." There may be resonance to current events, but they are rarely the timely recounting of a significant event we think of as "the news". But, they are about real people and usually about things that really happened.

It's not representative. There is no pretense that these stories are more than a glimpse into one life, one view, one story. The stories are more about the texture of an experience than a carefully structured look at a task or goal.

But. If I was designing an application for telemarketers, I can't imagine a better way to understand what that work is like than the story "The Fate Most of Us Fear". Having heard that story, I can't ignore it. I want to know more. Is it really true that the short pause on your answering machine is a weary sales associate grabbing a few seconds before the system pushes them on to the next call? What makes some people talk to that telemarketer like they are another human being? The story conjures up a whole world in 10 minutes.

Have you got a great story?

2009-02-13T21:31:09Z

We're looking for a few good stories.

Specifically, we'd like examples of how you use storytelling to help inform your design process or to communicate a design.

What's worked for you? Or did you try an idea that fell flat?

We'd like a rich selection of samples of different storytelling styles to include in the book. Maybe yours will be one of them.

Flinging stories into the future

2009-01-28T16:21:59Z

Kevin and I were thinking about how stories work. In many cases, the value of stories is in their ability to bring the past into the present.

Family stories and corporate stories both keep the past alive, creating a culture out of shared events and how they are shaped and interpreted in a story. Think of “the story of how our company was founded” as a guiding principle in the values and mission of a company.

Other stories preserve information as a narration about an event. The stories swapped by the Xerox copier repairmen, made famous in The Social Life of Information, are stories that serve as a knowledge management repository.

But the real value of stories in user experience design is that they can move us into the future.

Steve Denning’s springboard stories are like that. Their goal is to get a running start on a situation, and then let the audience take the final leap, imagining where that beginning might lead.

We started thinking about stories as a kind of trebuchet. You wind it up by loading it with information about the present. But it’s power comes when all that information is released to fly out into the future.

This can be a great way to introduce subtle shifts in context, and then describe a future that extends that trajectory. Here’s an example that explicitly builds on time:

20 years ago: He liked going to his favorite music store and browsing through the bins of classic vinyl for unusual records.
15 years ago: She's walking down the street talking on the phone...
10 years ago: He reads articles from 10 news papers from around the world a day.
5 years ago: After 30 years of collecting music, she could carry her entire music library in her purse, search through it quickly and play any selection. [And all she's missing are liner notes.]
Today: He hears a song playing in a café, holds up his phone, learns the title, and grabs it to add to his collection.

And here’s where your story of the future begins… In one way, it might be a wild fantasy for an innovation. But, the trebuchet reminds us of all the magical innovations that we’ve already seen, and shows us that maybe this new idea isn’t such a big leap after all.

We’re curious. What strategies have you used to introduce a radical idea, one that both breaks with the past and is an extension of it (if you look at it the right way)?

Can engineers tell stories?

2008-10-08T16:05:24Z

We couldn't have said it better ourselves. Miguel Jiménez wrote a blog post about the power of storytelling in interaction design and said:

Including a concise use of storytelling and sketching in User Experience processes can make a real difference. If a product is designed to communicate with users and interact, then communication is the base of the overall experience - improving communication and narrative skills should definitely improve acceptance and connection with users.

He goes on to talk about his own lack of skills in this area, and the workshops he's taking on digital journalism and creative narratives to improve them. We hope that Storytelling in User Experience Design will be exactly what Miguel is looking for. It's great to see so many people in UX getting interested in storytelling.

Occasionally, we hear that stories aren't appropriate in software engineering, or UX, or human factors, because these are scientific, engineering fields. When we talk about stories in user experience, we don't mean "make believe" or "made up" stories. It's a way of communicating, wrapping people and context and events into one package.

It's all about finding ways to talk about the big picture, not just the details.

Thanks, Miguel, for sharing your thoughts and your journey. And, we're pretty chuffed that you think of Kevin as an "eminence" in the field, too.

Stories catch their attention

2008-08-01T19:05:09Z

Thanks to Victor Lombardi for his post How to Tell a Story and a great summary of elements of a good story. The post illustrates the viral nature of great stories. It starts with a story about how Victor got interested in stories:

"I remember the first time someone impressed upon me the usefulness of storytelling. Back in 2000 a researcher came to Razorfish to study how we worked in order to improve our knowledge sharing. He told me how Secret Service agents studied storytelling so that, if they suddenly found themselves in the back of a car with the President for 5-minutes, they could quickly summarize all the pertinent facts about a situation in a format that was more likely to be absorbed."

Now, think about your last presentation. I bet there was something you really wanted everyone to hear. Did you summarize it in 5 bullet points. Or did you weave it into a short story that would make it compelling and help everyone remember what you said...and why it's important?