Storytelling is a valuable skill for UX professionals to be successful. According to our interviewee Iris Beneli, not everyone is a storyteller; not every UXer knows how to pose their data in that way, but if they do, it is absolutely beneficial to them and their career (Beneli). Other senior professionals in the field agree. The popular UX new source UXPA Magazine released an article recounting the advice of a Bay Area panel of experienced UX professionals at companies like Google. Although they all found diverse career paths that landed them in UX in different ways, they agreed that it helped them to learn how to sell their ideas as empathetic stories (Rivera, Andrew). Two of the panelists discussed the connection they found between empathy and storytelling, noting “that an essential skill of a successful designer is the ability to convey their user empathy to stakeholders through narrative” (Rivera, A.). Being able to communicate your ideas is what gives them value, so selling your ideas through storytelling is key. Another panelist put it simply, “‘The better you get at storytelling, the more influential you will be’” (Rivera, A.).
Seasoned UXers have said that storytelling can benefit the researcher, but what about the research itself? Storytelling has been seen in many different ways in UX research and writing, as a case study of a fitness app displays. Oyibo, et al.’s research methods depended on low-fidelity storyboards of the six persuasive features of the app: goal-setting/self-monitoring, rewards, cooperation, competition, and social learning (Oyibo). Visual charts and flows used to display data, as well as storyboards used to tell chronological experiences to participants, are storytelling elements that help visualize the app’s information and the case study’s story. Allowing participants to also write their own comments, gives them the space to tell their stories and discourages the bias of limiting response options. Comments like “‘I am fairly competitive and being able to see what my friends are doing may help push me even further to accomplish my goals’” (14), gives context to participants’ stories and experiences, showing how real people may feel about things like competitive persuasiveness. Gathering these stories during the research process gives quantitative data an explanation and reasons to latch on to. As our second interviewee put it at the end of our conversation, “I think [storytelling] is important for sharing research, but also for UX researchers to be able to talk about themselves and their processes to other folks—here’s what I did and why that was the appropriate choice” (Turner). Stories can come in the form of qualitative data and research methods, both of which are useful in the UX process.
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