Storytelling for User Experience: Crafting Stories for Better Design 1st edition by Whitney Quesenbery, Kevin Brooks (2010) Paperback Paperback – April 1, 2010

Very well structured. Makes you be a better storyteller at any level.After reading it you will be more concious of your performance when telling a story so you are able to deliver your message more efectevely

While I am a friend of Kevin's, this book represents my first exposure to his expertise as a user experience professional. I've now put the methods in the book to practical use, and I strongly recommend it to anyone who wants an easy way to get started in improving user experiences.I am one of the leading organizers of National Robotics Week, a broad initiative supported by industry, academia and nonprofits to raise public awareness of robotics and to celebrate how robots can help students excel in science, technology, engineering and math. After the first National Robotics Week in April 2010, I started to consider how we might be able to improve the website for 2011. Based on my previous work in human-robot interaction and ethnography, I recognize the importance of understanding the user when developing new technology. I haven't had any formal training in user experience, nor are there any UX specialists working in my division.Needless to say, the thought of reworking the website was overwhelming. We have many, many different groups with an interest in National Robotics Week -- members of the robotics industry, academic researchers, educators from formal and informal learning settings, students of all ages, robot hobbyists and more. I needed a way to organize the experiences that all of these groups had with using the website in 2010, and I needed a way to do it relatively quickly and inexpensively.I dove into _Storytelling for User Experience_ enthusiastically. Even without a background in user experience, I was able to understand why stories are important and see how to generate my own. I found the plentiful real-life examples and the summaries at the end of each chapter to be particularly helpful. With the book in hand, my small team and I started generating stories to capture the frustrations people had with the existing site and to brainstorm the experiences we wanted them to have the next year.Using the techniques presented in the book, we wrote a total of seventeen stories. These stories represented over a dozen personas and included a mix of both success and failure stories. We were able to combine our own experiences as site administrators with the feedback we received from users in a way that helped us see usability issues that we might have missed otherwise. By identifying the issues that appeared in multiple failure stories, we generated a list of the most pressing usability problems; the success stories helped us determine what features would best solve those problems. Based on our team's available time and resources, it was easy to prioritize the problems and features.We now have our list of most-needed features, and we're currently working on implementing them. Thanks to _Storytelling for User Experience_ , the resulting website will be much easier for visitors to use and for us to administer.I would highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to improve the usability of the technology they create, and especially to those people like me who don't have a strong user experience background or the resources to hire an expert in user experience. You will find that the book is written clearly and that the storytelling methodology is immediately accessible and useful.

There is nothing more persuasive than a well told story. As most User experiences revolve around an action done by a person, to achieve a result, creating a story to illustrate the success or failure of the action is a natural fit. It is also a natural fit for showing the user's motivation in the first place. The place of storytelling in the Usability engineers repertoire in many ways you would think is a natural one. However as most usability professionals are trained engineers/scientists the process of developing a story around their process/product may not come so easy. Most engineers are interested in facts and figures and not the softer stuff of storytelling. But facts and figures while being accurate, may not be as compelling as a well crafted story that puts their audience in the shoes of the user, or developing the story further to show the gains to be had in the market place for a more usable product. Let's face it storytelling is also salesmanship.This book addresses the role of storytelling in both Usability testing, Design and Reporting.Briefly the chapters are listed below. You can see the subchapters online as you can view inside this book. I've noted where items really grabbed my attention.Chapter 1: Why StoriesChapter 2: How UX Stories WorkChapter 3: Stories Start with Listening (and Observing)Chapter 4: The Ethics of StoriesChapter 5: Stories as part of a UX processChapter 6: Collecting Stories (as part of UX Research)*****(walking through tasks as a persona you are more likely to use a product like they would. I have done this many times and it always surprised me what I find independent of the design process)Chapter 7: Selecting Stories (as part of UX Analysis)Chapter 8: Using Stories for Design Ideas (how to transform them)*****(this section had some neat exercises to get you thinking about how stories can relate what you want to tell)Chapter 9: Evaluating with StoriesChapter 10: Sharing Stories (Managing Up and Across)Chapter 11: Crafting a StoryChapter 12: Considering the AudienceChapter 13: Combining the Ingredients of a StoryChapter 14: Developing Structure and Plot*****(I found this section very useful where it breaks down the kind of stories than are common and how to use them.)Chapter 15: Ways to tell StoriesChapter 16: Try Something NewI found this book to be a useful primer on how to use facts to create a story around a product. I think it is natural to do this, but not necessarily what one considers when creating a report. As a participant in many a dry report presentation, I know stories would help the data come alive.