UPA Boston Workshop: Crafting Stories for Better Design

Stories are an effective way to collect, analyze and share qualitative information from user research, spark design imagination and help us create usable products. We all tell stories all the time, but to craft a story for a particular audience, for a particular reason and effect, requires some instruction and modeling, a reasonable amount of practice, and a lot of listening.

In this half day workshop, participants will learn the mechanics of storytelling as it applies to oral and written presentation through instruction, modeling and practice. There will be a number of small and larger group exercises that reinforce introduced concepts and allow participants to practice telling UX stories in a safe atmosphere of constructive critique. Participants are encouraged to bring their own UX story material to develop in the workshop, with the understanding that their stories will be shared with the workshop public.

Workshop attendees will work on one of their own stories and try out different storytelling elements such as imagery, different story structures and telling stories in different contexts.

The itinerary will include:

• A short background on using storytelling in UX
• A series of exercises to iteratively develop your own story
• Deep dives into story structures, using imagery, and story context
• Using stories in different UX contexts (in reports, presentations, elevators…)

Target Audience:
Intermediate or Advanced UX Professionals; People who know they have a good UX story waiting to be told!

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Our instructors:

Whitney Quesenbery is a user researcher, user experience practitioner, and usability expert with a passion for clear communication. She has been in the field since 1989, helping companies from The Open University to the National Cancer Institute develop usable web sites and applications. She enjoys learning about people around the world and using those insights to design products where people matter. Before she was seduced by a little beige computer into software, usability, and interface design, Whitney was a theatrical lighting designer on and off Broadway, learning about storytelling from some of the masters. The lessons from the theatre stay with her in creating user experiences.

Kevin Brooks is a Principal Staff Researcher for Motorola Labs and a professional oral storyteller. At Motorola Kevin researches new user interface technologies and expresses them using various media as connected user-centered experiences for the research and business sectors. As a writer and performing oral storyteller, Kevin tells personal tales from his urban childhood of the 60's, his 70's adolescence, 80's adulthood, through to his present day parenthood of adolescents. His stories for adults and family audiences resonate with humor and poignancy, as can be heard on his CD Kiss of Summer, and he has been featured performer at storytelling festivals, conferences and other venues. Kevin has given numerous storytelling workshops to engineers, designers, storytellers and even people with normal world views.

PLEASE NOTE: This workshop is located in the Adamian Student Center Commons - Room 341 at Bentley University and NOT at the usual workshop location (the DUC classroom).  Directions will be sent to all attendees.