Practitioners-Guide-User-Experience-Design

WHAT MAKES A GOOD STORY?
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times …
Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
Call me Ishmael.
Herman Melville, Moby Dick
As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed
in his bed into a gigantic insect.
Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis
These are the opening lines of three of the greatest stories ever told. I’d venture that those
of us who have read these books will always be able to name the book the line is from in a
flash, even many decades after reading them. Even lots of people who haven’t read these
books can tell you where these lines are from. They’ve been so influential that they’ve
made their way into the collective cultural consciousness.
As UX designers, maybe we can’t hope to tell a story as well as Dickens, Melville, or
Kafka, but we are storytellers, and this is one of the most enjoyable aspects of the job. The
kinds of stories we tell are different in many ways from novels, films, songs, and
symphonies, which are all forms of storytelling of their own. But there are some
fundamental similarities as well.
Every story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Which doesn’t at all mean that a
story has to unfold in that order. Take the case of the story usually attributed to Ernest
Hemingway that is all of six words long:
For sale: baby shoes, never worn.
I still get goose bumps every time I read that. The story proceeds from the end, to the
beginning, to the middle. A baby has been born (baby shoes), but some tragedy has
happened (never worn), so the shoes are for sale (the end). What an emotional wallop
from six little words. The story also pulls us in; it has an interactivity to it. Hemingway
makes us figure out the drama, creating a sense of mystery for that fleeting moment we’re
left to wonder why the shoes have never been worn. And, of course, it’s marvelously
efficient. There are many wonderful stories that are very long—anyone read Proust?—but
that doesn’t mean their authors wasted words. Truly good storytellers always move their
stories along at a good pace, and any given passage, even if it seems to be a long
digression, will have clear relevance to the larger story eventually.
But the art of storytelling is also always evolving, and it too has come a long way
since its inception. Experts in human evolution think that the first stories were told for
utilitarian purposes of survival. They developed to literally save our lives by giving
warnings of dangerous places, people, or animals. Now, of course, many stories are told
purely for entertainment purposes, but stories are still a potent method—probably the most
potent—for teaching information, for persuasion, and for engagement. UX designers most
fundamentally want the work we do to be effective, meaning we want to help our users