Intro:

Storytelling for User Experience is a book by Whitney Quesenbery & Kevin Brooks, as well as the main text for my Interactive Storytelling class. This weeks chapter focused on the ingredients of a story: perspective, characters, context, imagery, language of the story. As I read through this, I pulled some valuable insights that were both refreshing and gave me a lot to chew on; these are my thoughts on what resonated with me most.

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Quote 1:

...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.

Knowing one's audience is probably the most important part of storytelling, in my opinion. This quote is a concise insight into understanding that point, and I find it to be a true north for applying this chapter's principles. By nature, I think that we tend to start with our own why for telling our stories, but as UX designers, we are inherently creating products that come from our user's stories, and so it is even more critical that we start from looking outside ourselves and work back inwardly. The users perspectives build the frame for us, and so when we are painting a picture juxtaposing problem and solution, we cannot force our own perspective into the forefront, or else we run the risk of losing our audience before even hooking them in. By meditating on this quote, I realized, that by getting our audience to see themselves in the story we're telling, the solution(s) we present can give them a sense of catharsis as there is a less steep onramp to getting them onboard by the end of it.

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Quote 2:

These should not be whimsical decisions, but careful choices to help craft the story.

In my first design job, I worked as a junior marketer for a comedy club. One of my tasks was video editing, where I would post great jokes on social media, as well edit down comedians sets so that they can put them into their reels and study what did or didn't work for different jokes. As such, I watched hundreds if not thousands of hours worth of material, and something that I became really adept at recognizing (particularly for posting a joke on social media) was not just the punchline, but the 'payoff' of when a comedian would tell a story. The difference being, having a great payoff at the end came from the comedians setup to the punchline(s) being a sequence of events that felt plausible, no matter the absurdity of the scenario described, and result in a feeling of there being a resolution, versus a punchline acting as punctuation for that resolution. For great storytellers, in the setup, the characters involved wouldn't do outlandish things just for the sake of something being 'a funny thing to do', but there was a logic behind their actions and reactions within context which would coincidentally be hilarious enough to adapt into a story.

This quote gave me an instant flashback to that time, and I think that translating that technique into use for UX is just as relevant for this profession. I agree with the notion that throwing in whimsical characters or anecdotes for the hell of it doesn't 'punch up' (as comedians say) a story, but rather distracts and can lead to losing your audience. The emotional payoff comes from the intentionality of descriptions and introduction of characters/scenarios/behaviors etc., and not from verbalized intrusive thoughts. In short, we as designers need to be hyper-aware that we're taking our audience on a journey, and not an odyssey.

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Quote 3:

Imagery works with all the other ingredients—perspective, context, and character. It makes them memorable by adding word pictures that describe specific details.

To continue with my relation between this chapter and comedy, imagery is truly your bread and butter for 'punching up' your story telling. Finding a balance with adding imagery though is something that is in itself an art. If you add too much, you might just end up with something more akin to creative fiction instead of something grounded in reality, but given some flavor to make the story more easy to chew on and digest. On the opposite end, by adding too little, you end up with a professional briefing. Factual, cold, and disengaging. Having interesting imagery is critical to not fall into recounting events, and develop your story into something that moves people and causes your audience to take with them long after you've told it.

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Final Thoughts:

None of these are extra—they are what makes something a story and not just a chronological report

As a final note, this quote gets to the heart of what these ingredients do. They're parts of a whole—inseparable and interweaved with each other—and are staples for serving up stories that touch, move, and inspire.