This week's assignment is to post three responses to quotes in the text “Storytelling for User Experience” by Whitney Quesenbery & Kevin Brooks.
The first quote is from Annette Simmons, where she describes a vision story as one that “raises your gaze from current difficulties to a future payoff that successfully competes with the temptation to give up, compromise, or change direction.”
I appreciate this message from Annette about telling a vision story that helps us look past current difficulties to future payoffs. The example about the iRobot named “Scooby Doo” was a powerful vision story because it showed how the work of the engineers to build a robot saved a life when the robot was exploded by a bomb. I liked how the soldiers collected Scooby Doo’s pieces and sent them back to the engineers. Having the robot in the lobby of the headquarters tells a vision story of why they do the work of building robots to save humans from unexploded bombs. This story about the iRobot is one they tell to new employees and people at conferences because it uplifts the spirits of people and inspires them to think beyond their current circumstances. The Annie song “The sun will come out tomorrow” is another vision story that comes to mind.
The next quote is a long story of short experience with a cat. “ In the context section of the class, I would tell a story about my cat when I was a kid. The main part of the story described an event that took all of about three seconds in real time, but I surrounded it with explicit and implicit context, which made the whole story last about 12 minutes.”
This quote is interesting because the author points out that when he is done telling the story, he asks about the house and everybody who had listened had different perspectives about what the house looked like based on their own upbringing and what country they were from. This is a story about physical context, and how leaving some details out of the story lets people fill them in with their imaginations.
The third quote I will share is in regards to the value of user stories. “One of the reasons stories are so useful in user experience design is that they add specificity and texture to the one-dimensional views of users that we often see.”
I agree that user experience stories are quite effective at adding texture and specificity to a one dimensional user. It goes on to mention how important it is to craft our characters based on real data gathered from people, and not a whimsical decision to be interesting. It also mentions a screenwriting concept called “dictio” where a character will make a statement early in the film that later proves untrue to provide a full circle experience. This is like when Ronald Frump said he was going to hire the best people, and then a bunch of them ended up in prison; including his lawyer.
My favorite quote is from a story about blind people sharing their perspective on an elephant. “No you’re all mistaken, the elephant is like a rope.” This shows how our given perspective does not always take into account the entirety of the situation. The blind person who thinks the elephants tail is a rope, differs from the other blind people that think the elephant is a wall, a spear, a snake, or a tree; because they are feeling different parts of the elephants body and only have that as a reference.
The main takeaway for me personally is to understand and use the given elements to craft a user experience story that lifts people from the current circumstances into a place of hope. The elements are Perspective, Characters, Context, Imagery, and Language and they are all necessary parts to creating well-rounded personas. These elements of storytelling if done well, can add up to a rich and detailed emotional experience.