Start telling stories tomorrow: A practical guide to UX storytelling
Anything can have a story, including your design work. Follow this guide to tell your first plot-driven story about your product design work.
How moved are you by a bowl of pasta? Or decluttering your home?
Probably not much. But contextualize that bowl of pasta as the reason why Massimo Bottura becomes the world acclaimed chef of the three Michelin star restaurant, Osteria Francescana, and that bowl of pasta becomes very inspiring. Or envision a home decluttering method so deeply personal and visceral that Marie Kondo, a Japanese organizing consultant, publishes 4 books and gets featured in an entire Netflix series, and suddenly, all we want to do is declutter our homes.
A basic meal and mundane chore, how did they become so famous? Hint, it’s in the title (it’s stories). If a bowl of pasta and decluttering method have a story, anything can, including your design work. If you’re new to design and haven’t heard of the term “storytelling” yet, read about it here as one of the three skills you need to level up in your design career.
Many resources cover why storytelling is important and the theories behind it, but it’s hard to imagine what exactly is a story in our work as product designers. So without further ado, here is the most practical guide to immediately get your storytelling game started.
Start with the formula to create a plot
All stories have a plot. Massimo Bottura is a rags to riches story where a humble, little-known tortellini dish turns the man from a run-of-the-mill chef into one of the world’s greatest. The KonMari method’s story of someone who goes through all of their belongings and only keeps the ones that spark joy is a story of rebirth.
Rags to riches and rebirth are both types of plot archetypes. For now, let’s not worry about understanding the types of plot, and instead look at the basic make-up of all plots. All plots follow this base formula:
Plot = Exposition + Rising Action + Climax + Falling action + Resolution
Seeing is believing, let’s look at each element through three different lenses: the classic fairy tale of Cinderella, the parts of a design project, and an example pitch to leadership refreshing the onboarding flow of an app that tracks your carbon footprint.
The exposition provides the necessary context to catch someone up in your story.
Cinderella: Cinderella lives with her evil stepfamily and can’t go to the Prince’s Ball.
Parts of a design project: This is the status quo of the product and any other relevant project context.
Example onboarding pitch: Users currently see a login screen after downloading the app.
The rising action is the events that lead up to the climax.
Cinderella: Cinderella’s fairy godmother gifts her a magical gown and chariot that expires at midnight.
Parts of a design project: These are the facts and discoveries that contribute to a design problem or project goal.
Example onboarding pitch: User research and data reveal low account creation because people don’t understand what the app does.
The climax is the turning point of the story.
Cinderella: The prince and Cinderella fall in love, and the clock strikes midnight.
Parts of a design project: This is a quick summary of the design problem and your proposed solution.
Example onboarding pitch: The team designed a new onboarding flow to increase account creation.
The falling action is the events that tie up the open threads.
Cinderella: The prince identifies Cinderella through her glass slipper.
Parts of a design project: These are the supporting facts, hypotheses, and assumptions behind your solution.
Example onboarding pitch: The onboarding flow will have a welcome screen and survey to help users understand the product.
The resolution is the end results.
Cinderella: Cinderella and the prince get married living happily ever after.
Parts of a design project: This is the impact and consequences of your solution.
Example onboarding pitch: The team needs 3 weeks to build this and we expect account creations to increase.
Stringing together our example onboarding pitch, here we have our basic, plot-driven story:
Right now after downloading the app, our users are greeted with an account creation screen. User research revealed that people aren’t creating accounts from here because they don’t understand what our product does. In fact, data from last month shows that only 20% of the people who downloaded our app also created an account. There’s a large opportunity to improve conversion after app download. To capture this opportunity, I refreshed the onboarding flow experience to prevent mid-funnel drop off. Rather than an account creation screen, users are greeted with a welcome screen and then guided through a short survey about their carbon footprint behavior before being asked to create an account. Our team estimates this change will take 3 weeks of eng time and will increase sign ups by 50%.
Break your story up into three sub-plots
Because projects tends to follow a structured process, the most intuitive way to tell a story is chronologically. Plot-wise, this is called the quest, except this quest is centered around you instead of your designs. Unless you are a well-seasoned UX storyteller, don’t tell this kind of chronological design story. To illustrate why not, here’s how the same onboarding flow sounds with chronological storytelling:
Our team set a goal this quarter to improve the product’s mid-funnel conversion rate. We started with a hypothesis that improving the app onboarding flow would increase the account creation rate. I conducted a brainstorm with the full team and then on my own, put together a competitive analysis of similar app onboarding flows. I also wanted to supplement my design learnings with data, so I submitted a data request to our analytics team. The team estimated 8 weeks to complete the data investigation, so instead, I asked my engineering team for some SQL pointers and pulled this data myself. We discovered that from our social media ads we see our app is downloaded 5% of the time. Of these downloads, 20% create an account, of which 80% complete our carbon footprint behavioral survey. 15% of these users become active users. Based off all of these learnings, I explored these eight different directions. Working with my PM, Pam, we decided the directions with introductory text and an interactive preview of our app would be both impactful and easy to implement. Having introductory text before account creation has both legal and marketing implications so we’ll have to work with both teams to approve of our copy. Both teams are underwater though, so I haven’t had the chance to get the content you see here reviewed with either team. I took three of the strongest versions of this concept through user research and interviewed 8 participants from our target audience. Here’s a sample of the research I ran. The main takeaway is that people care less about their actual carbon footprint, and more about how much positive impact they’ve had in total. Based off my learnings and a few iterations with the team, we landed on this onboarding experience. Users see a welcome screen with our value prop and then get to preview our app’s carbon footprint behavior survey.
Notice how difficult this narrative is to follow? Even though we eventually get to the final design proposal, we’ve also thoroughly buried the lede. This structure gives the audience every piece of information possible, and then asks them to figure out what’s important.
Instead, we want to use the Rule of Three and choose 3 mini sub-plots about your designs that will support the main plot. There’s some theory behind this rule, but for now, use your top three most impactful design features and drop everything else. Here are three sub-plots I pulled from the quest example pitch story.
Users are welcomed to the app and see our primary value prop.
Users answer some questions about their carbon footprint behaviors to better understand the purpose of the app.
Users are prompted to create an account after seeing their potential positive impact.
Omit everything irrelevant to why you’re telling this story
The moral of Disney’s Cinderella is that kindness is beauty and both are rewarded. Every major event in the story supports this theme. Your product design story needs a “moral”, or purpose for telling, as well.
The “moral” of your product design story is the reason you’re telling this story. In the case of the carbon footprint app example, we’re pitching a design proposal to leadership. Other storytelling reasons might include aligning your team on a design vision, teeing up a discussion for next steps, and getting feedback. Whatever the reason, every story detail has to ladder back to the primary reason.
It’s very easy to include extraneous details in your story. Here are the most common story wandering details that I hear, and what they sounded like in the chronological telling of the carbon footprint app example:
Going too in-depth on the process details → I conducted a brainstorm with the full team and then on my own, put together a competitive analysis of similar app onboarding flows. I also wanted to supplement my design learnings with data, so I submitted a data request to our analytics team.
Getting lost in stakeholder drama → Having introductory text before account creation has both legal and marketing implications so we’ll have to work with both teams to approve of our copy. Both teams are underwater though, so I haven’t had the chance to review this copy with either team.
Diluting the story with personal trials → The team estimated 8 weeks to complete the data investigation, so instead, I asked my engineering team for some SQL pointers and pulled this data myself.
All of these are great standalone points, but not worthwhile talking about in your pitch to leadership. Omit these details. You can save them for a deeper conversation when they can provide more value.
Storytelling is an art. There are many ways to tell a good product design story, and what we covered here is a framework to tell the most basic of stories. Once you get the hang of this structure and framework though, go ahead and experiment. You can test out using different types of plot, playing with how the three sub-plots work together, and varying the point of view you tell you story from. All of these flourishes will make your story more engaging. I’m excited to hear the stories you’ll tell.