From Data to Drama
The power of storytelling in user experience research
Most of the research presentations I’ve seen felt more like a bunch of data, charts, and quotes backed by valuable insights, but they ended up having little impact or engagement from the audience, whether it was stakeholders or clients.
User experience research goes beyond mere data collection; it seeks to reveal the complex tapestry of human behavior, motivations, and mental frameworks. A powerful, yet often underestimated, tool in this endeavor is storytelling.
According to a study by the Stanford Graduate School of Business, stories are remembered up to 22 times more than just plain facts. It’s no surprise that a lot of human knowledge has been passed down through stories because they stick in our minds so well.
A natural way to process information
We’re born, grow up, and live our whole lives seeing, hearing, and telling stories. Whether at school, at home, on TV, or in a book, stories are always around us. Without even realizing it, we create stories around random facts so our minds can build a narrative that helps us understand and give meaning and a human touch to the world.
People process information best when it’s in story form because stories don’t just connect separate bits of info in a logical way, they also make them interesting and engaging. The power of storytelling can turn complex situations into something easier to understand, plus it lets you steer the story down different suggestive paths.
Telling research stories
So, why not use storytelling techniques to share your research?
To create stories that really connect with your audience, you need a solid narrative structure with things like characters, scenarios, motivations, challenges, a conclusion, and a main insight. These elements tap into people’s emotions and memories, making your message feel more authentic and credible.
Let’s dive into some of these elements:
Characters: In UX, we call them personas. These are evidence-based character sketches of typical users. They show common behavior patterns and goals of bigger user groups as they relate to your product.
Personas have a name, a photo, and a background story. These things make your personas feel real and human, and unlike a made-up character from a movie or book, everything about them is based on real info you collected in your research. This way, you tap into human empathy while keeping your personas accurate and true to the data you used to create them.
Scenarios: This is where the story actually plays out. It gives the background that makes the persona’s motivations and struggles make sense in the narrative. It’s not just about the setting itself, but also things like the persona’s emotional state and what resources they have (or don’t have). It’s important to include their motivations and the challenges they face in this scenario too. Doing this helps you organize and prioritize the tasks your persona would do in that situation, showing how and why the interactions happen.
In user experience research, teams that used personas and scenarios reported a 40% improvement in alignment between product design and user expectations (Source: UXmatters survey, 2023).
In the end, the main goal is to tell a story that’s engaging, relevant, and backed up by real evidence to support every recommendation and conclusion you make.
Storytelling in user research isn’t just something you use when you’re showing off your findings. It’s actually a key part of the whole process from start to finish. When researchers tell stories, they can get a much better idea of how users think and what they believe. This helps them really understand what’s going on in people’s minds. Plus, when you share these stories, it’s way easier to explain your discoveries to everyone else on the team, like other designers, devs or managers. It also helps those people put themselves in the users’ shoes and see things from their perspective. Because of this, teams are more likely to come up with products and services that make sense, feel good to use, and actually solve real problems for users. In the end, using stories helps everyone stay focused on what users really need, which leads to better results all around.
If you’re wondering where to start with AI interactions, I recommend the AI-Powered UX: Next-Gen Product Design course on Udemy. In this course, I teach how to use AI for research, data analysis, ideation, and prototyping, transforming the way you design digital products. The course is in English but includes Portuguese subtitles.