Storytelling for User Experience: Crafting Stories for Better Design

We all use stories to communicate, explore, persuade, and inspire. In user experience, stories help us to understand our users, learn about their goals, explain our research, and demonstrate our design ideas. In this book, Quesenbery and Brooks teach you how to craft and tell your own unique stories to improve your designs.

Testimonials

“Stories facilitate a level of communication that is as close to telepathy as you can get. Kevin and Whitney guide you to use storytelling in `how to’ scenarios so smoothly that you may never realize how far you leapfrogged ahead and never know the mistakes you didn’t make because of this book. It’s that good.”
—Annette Simmons, author of The Story Factor

“A very practical, readable survey of ways to use one of the world’s oldest and most powerful transmedia forms—storytelling—to increase the coherence and effectiveness of digital artifacts. Brooks and Quesenbery offer concrete strategies for creating a richer design process and more successful user experiences.”
—Janet Murray, Director of Graduate Studies, Digital Media M.S./Ph.D. Program, Georgia Tech

“Whitney and Kevin clearly articulate the power and effectiveness of storytelling for understanding users and communicating their real experiences to all project stakeholders. Their guidelines for integrating storytelling into user research and design have already given me new ways to help my clients better know their users and deliver great products and services. This is a reference I will be reaching for regularly.”
—Karen Bachmann, Partner, Seascape Consulting

“I have been tantalized by the power of the story to impact so many facets of the user experience process. The arrival of this thoughtful, actionable, and wide-ranging book is a glorious day!
—Steve Portigal, Principal, Portigal Consulting

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Why Stories?
Chapter 2: How UX Stories Work
Chapter 3: Stories Start with Listening (and Observing)
Chapter 4: The Ethics of Stories
Chapter 5: Stories as Part of a UX Process
Chapter 6: Collecting Stories (as Part of Research)
Chapter 7: Selecting Stories (as Part of Analysis)
Chapter 8: Using Stories for Design Ideas
Chapter 9: Evaluating with Stories
Chapter 10: Sharing Stories (Managing Up and Across)
Chapter 11: Crafting a Story
Chapter 12: Considering the Audience
Chapter 13: Combining the Ingredients of a Story
Chapter 14: Developing Structure and Plot
Chapter 15: Ways to Tell Stories
Chapter 16: Try Something New