Blog Archive

August 9, 2010: Storytelling in depth - 2 workshops (0 comments)

Two opportunities to dive in to the practice of storytelling for UX coming up in the Boston Area: Crafting Stories for Better Design - half-day workshop at UPA Boston In April, Whitney Quesenbery and Kevin Brooks released their book, Storytelling...

July 23, 2010: Storytelling for UX: a UIE Virtual Seminar (0 comments)

Registration is open for my UIE Virtual Seminar on August 5th. I'll talk a little bit about the role that stories can play in your work and how they can help you present your design ideas in a more compelling...

July 20, 2010: Stories that persuade (1 comments)

A tweet from Karen Bachmann led me to an article in The Boston Globe, "How facts backfire." It says: Facts don't necessarily have the power to change our minds. In fact, quite the opposite. In a series of studies in...

July 15, 2010: Stories that sell (0 comments)

Case studies. Customer stories. According to Casey Hibbard, they: "...serve a role that no other promotional tools truly fill by accomplishing three key purposes at once: credibility, education, and validation... Customer stories complement all other communications and bridge a gap...

July 12, 2010: 1 hour of fame (0 comments)

Thursday, 2:58pm ET, we got an email from Slideshare: "Your presentation is being tweeted more than any other document on SlideShare right now." That gave us one hour of fame on the home page for our presentation from UPA Boston....

July 4, 2010: Getting at the vision thing (0 comments)

Whether you are running a company, a team, a product or a project, you've probably spent some time thinking about vision. We're often so preoccupied with day-to-day tactics that it can be hard to step back. Thaler Pekar works with...

June 30, 2010: ePUB version ... hooray! (0 comments)

I'm really excited that there's now an ePUB version of the book. Not only will it work on iPhone and iPad, but I'm running it on Aldiko, a reader for Android. The reading experience is pretty good. The illustrations look...

June 11, 2010: Presentations and competitions (2 comments)

We've been out and about with presentations in Dallas, Austin, Munich and Boston. There will be more to come with an appearance at Agile 2010 on the UX Stage, a UIE Virtual Seminar and a return to Boston in August...

June 4, 2010: Just like me: Using personalized narratives to find government services (0 comments)

We're always on the lookout for interesting uses of stories, so a presentation at UPA 2010 caught our attention. We know user research can find juicy story tidbits. And that those fragments can be crafted into stories that illuminate context...

May 6, 2010: Interview with Tom Johnson (0 comments)

I just got back from the STC Summit 2010, where I was interviewed by Tom Johnson for his blog I'd Rather be Writing....

May 5, 2010: Getting out into the world (0 comments)

Now that the book is out in the world, Kevin and I are coming out from behind the screen as well. On May 24, we will be in Munich with an evening tutorial at the UPA conference. It's a chance...

April 17, 2010: Storytelling for User Experience is now on sale (4 comments)

There is a FedEx delivery person who will never look at my front door the same way again. When I saw a small box just about the right size, I began jumping about like a maniac. (I did manage to...

March 24, 2010: Storytelling for User Experience illustrations now available on Flickr (2 comments)

We've made all the images in Storytelling for User Experience available via Flickr and under a Creative Commons license. View, download and use in your own presentations, make them your desktop background... whatever suits your fancy. The book is now...

March 19, 2010: A moment of contemplation... (0 comments)

The book went to the publisher this week and we get a little break to reflect while we wait to see it in print. We started writing this book because we both believe that stories are a powerful tool in...

March 10, 2010: How is a picture like an interview? (3 comments)

I met Julie Kertesz (or joyoflife, as she is known on Flickr) for a photowalk around the London Borough Market. I wanted to know how she manages to create such open and personal photographs of real people from the streets...

January 28, 2010: Aha moments: insights in what someone doesn't say (0 comments)

We put out a call for stories of "aha" moments during user research, when something observed in the context illuminates an entire aspect of experience. Nancy Frishberg sent us this story. It's a wonderful example of how people may not...

January 24, 2010: Stories pack information into tight spaces (1 comments)

One of the values of using stories is how much information they can pack into a few words. The IBM Knowledge Socialization Project has an example: "My sister-in-law went shopping at Nordstrom's at Christmas time. Later, they discovered that their...

January 4, 2010: Tell stories. Eat more broccoli. (1 comments)

Researchers at St. Louis University have been investigating whether topics as important as mammography, colorectal cancer risk reduction, and general cancer education can be improved with storytelling. One of the challenges in healthcare today is to reduce what folks in...

December 29, 2009: "The single, most powerful communications tool you have" (0 comments)

That's a quote from Andy Goodman in a talk on storytelling as a way to communicate the value of a non-profit's work. It's the story of changing a presentation from facts, figures and tiny print to a story. It's not...

December 4, 2009: Starting with Structure - Tomato Paste (0 comments)

I am blessed with an embarrassment of riches when it comes to storytelling support in the Boston, MA area. There are a number of different organizations, gatherings and venues, one of which is MassMouth. This fall MassMouth started running Story...

December 4, 2009: Where books come to life (2 comments)

It all started with this tweet from storytelling maven Tim Sheppard The power of story, brought to life. Caution: may cause heart attacks in archivists & librarians. The link points to a YouTube video called "Going West." Dramatic reading? Animation?...

November 21, 2009: Can technology kill storytelling? (3 comments)

Someone sent me an article that suggested that "The Internet is Killing Storytelling." The author contents that no one can think in more than 140 characters any more, and that the skills needed to create and listen to an extended...

November 7, 2009: Brother Blue, Storyteller (1 comments)

Brother Blue, a legendary figure in storytelling, died on December 3. He was the center of a community of storytellers in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for over 20 years. Kevin Brooks and Laura Packer call him the father of modern storytelling. "His...

June 15, 2009: A storied career (0 comments)

Kathy Hansen's blog, A Storied Career, has links to all things about organizational storytelling. Her topics range from "storytelling and change" to "storytelling and social media" to a wonderful collection of quotations about stories and storytelling. And, she interviews story...

June 3, 2009: UX Book Salon at UPA 2009 in Portland

Want to talk about storytelling? We always do, so we're taking an hour out of the UPA conference in Portland to invite folks to a UX Book Salon on Thursday morning at 8:30. We're looking forward to a lively conversation...

February 26, 2009: What kind of story is this? (0 comments)

One of my favorite radio programs is This American Life. Each week, it collects a few stories on a theme, looking from a few, often offbeat, perspectives. These are examples of fantastic storytelling, masterminded by Ira Glass. You can hear...

February 13, 2009: Have you got a great story? (10 comments)

We're looking for a few good stories. Specifically, we'd like examples of how you use storytelling to help inform your design process or to communicate a design. What's worked for you? Or did you try an idea that fell flat?...

January 28, 2009: Flinging stories into the future (3 comments)

Kevin and I were thinking about how stories work. In many cases, the value of stories is in their ability to bring the past into the present. Family stories and corporate stories both keep the past alive, creating a culture...

October 8, 2008: Can engineers tell stories? (0 comments)

We couldn't have said it better ourselves. Miguel Jiménez wrote a blog post about the power of storytelling in interaction design and said: Including a concise use of storytelling and sketching in User Experience processes can make a real difference....

August 1, 2008: Stories catch their attention (0 comments)

Thanks to Victor Lombardi for his post How to Tell a Story and a great summary of elements of a good story. The post illustrates the viral nature of great stories. It starts with a story about how Victor got...

July 8, 2008: How stories work: personal or impersonal (0 comments)

When you tell stories for user experience design, they can be either "impersonal" or"personal." Each can work equally well in different situations and each can fall flat, with the listener launching into a verbal defense like, "Oh how often does...

July 1, 2008: Reasons to use stories: they help us understand "why" (0 comments)

Accessibility questions have come up on several lists recently, with an interesting twist. People were looking for answers not about exactly what they had to do, but why. What problem, for example, does a WCAG 2.0 checkpoint answer? Invariably, someone...

June 24, 2008: How long do stories last? (1 comments)

Kevin and I were talking about how we create stories. And that led us to think about how long a story has to last. Of course some stories are carefully crafted. Kevin’s roller coaster story has been told and refined...

March 16, 2008: Introductions (4 comments)

Welcome to the working site for our upcoming book on Storytelling in User Experience Design. Kevin and I met on June 12, 2006 in Bloomfield, Colorado. We were both there for UPA 2006: Usability Through Storytelling. Moments before the day...