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 started, I discovered that one of the people in my tutorial on Telling Personas’ Stories was none other than our closing keynote speaker. (Yikes!) Next year, it was my turn, when Kevin and Laura Packer gave a tutorial called “Listening and Telling: The Practice of Storytelling in Modern Times.”

We kept in touch, and kept talking about storytelling. Our experiences complement each other. I started in theatre, where I learned the importance of the selection of details, timing and the visual experience in telling a story. I connected the dots between that world and user research through personas. Kevin is deeply grounded in the modern storytelling tradition and storytelling as performance. He uses stories as a business tool, as part of the process of innovation, and as a way of interacting.

Why should you care about stories and storytelling? They are not a straightforward user research technique like card sorting. Or focused on a specific aspect of design, like forms. But hearing, selecting, crafting and using stories is an important part of our work as user experience practitioners.

As we work on this book, we hope to hear from many of you about how you use stories. You may not even think of them as stories, but you draw on the rich tradition of storytelling when you:

• write a narrative that incorporates qualitative research into a persona
• use an example or video clip from a usability test to explain a problem
• create scenarios showing a new design innovating a new interaction
• or even share an experience from user research to remind a team about the people who will use their product.

Do you have a great story about using stories in your work? We'd love to hear about it. Our current plan for the book is to talk about WHY we tell stories, WHAT it is about stories that make them work, HOW to tell stories using different mediums, and WHO stories are for (the various audiences). There may also be a "where" and "when" in there somewhere as well. So if you have a story about story, we're all ears.

Whitney and Kevin