How to Resonate With Users by UX Storytelling?

UX Design

Have you ever had the feeling that a company and its product or service were made just for you or tailored to your beliefs, aspirations, and personality? I bet it feels great to be able to control such a huge mass of people and their spending habits.

However, creating relevance and establishing engagement with the users’ unique requirements is not an easy task. People are not just simple beings who have simple thoughts and ideas inside them. Rather, each one of us has his or her own world. Such differences many companies do not endeavor to understand and make use of the assumptions that are more generalized.

Therefore, how can you design experiences that reflect real life for the target users? The answer to this is UX storytelling, a concept that aims to create good stories that explain the user’s experiences.

Why Does UX Storytelling Matters? 

Why do UX research and storytelling have to be intertwined, and how does this symbiosis help create a bridge between product designers and consumers? Most importantly, how can you apply this approach to meet your customer’s needs and bring value to your enterprise? 

What Is Storytelling in UX Design?

UX storytelling can be defined as the process of developing stories to help explain things to users and design products for them. It is about viewing the product design with a focus on the user’s needs and challenges. It is through stories that we are able to share and have an emotional bond. Products with similar stories will create the same level of identification.

In this case, user personas are one of the most effective UX storytelling techniques. High-quality personas take bare-boned user data and turn it into relatable characters that embody the target markets. These are fictitious but fact-based stereotypes as they portray realism in terms of background information of their context and individual desires.

Therefore, when implementing storytelling for user experience, you consider the user as the protagonist in the story. They may be exposed to increased tension and conflict in their search for a resolution. However, what should that conflict be? This is what visualizing the arc of a target user can show. We will describe a typical example below that will help illustrate my points better.

Fintech products are usually informative, with a lot of information and tables. You could tell the tale of a man who used to lay out his budget in a few spreadsheets, which were easy to do but not very efficient. Now, they are overwhelmed by interfaces with information they have to go through. This way, one can understand the hurdles faced by the users and learn the ways by which the user experience can be made less complicated.

With this arc in mind, you can then add a brief fintech app’s microcopy to illuminate the rationale of each screen. You can disclose information step by step rather than at once so that the other party does not get a full picture of the information being disclosed.

Hence, UX design storytelling is based on easily recognizable narrative patterns, which makes it possible to develop adhesive user experiences.

Now, let’s discuss how exactly it is possible to turn the utilitarian UX into a matching design. We’ll talk about it through the experience of Linkup Studio. 

Advantages of Storytelling in the Context of User Experience

Sophisticated and clean-looking apps and pretty nice-looking functions are good. However, that is the case when they fail to create the desired impact on internet users. Here’s how you can benefit from storytelling in UX design:

• Guide unified decision-making. Tales maintains the customer at the center of the implemented processes. Beginning with concept and design phases and continuing through post-launch testing, storytelling in UX helps cross-functional teams recall actual living target users with aspirations and challenges that products and services must solve. Thus, the temptation of switching to technical feasibility is minimized.
• Humanize complex data. The collected raw data in surveys and interviews, as well as analysis tools, do not always capture underlying behaviors and motivations. UX storytelling simplifies this quantitative and qualitative information about target users into stories and provides those insights, known as “aha moments.”
• Explore edge cases. Average user personas focus on the most common profiles, such as ‘working mothers’ or ‘business people.’ However, the smaller segments are also present and contribute to the overall pie. Storytelling will enable you to capture all these and more since you are presenting it in a more artistic way.
• Increased trust and loyalty. Researchers have discovered that when people listen to good stories, their body releases oxytocin – a hormone responsible for social connection. When you go to your end users in a compassionate way and give them products that meet 100 percent of their needs, that is when you make a bond. Users will feel they are valued, and their voices are heard, and this will make them return for more.
• Enhanced team collaboration. As with any other discipline, UX design benefits from storytelling by directly assisting the end user as well as encouraging collaboration. The design of products may be a challenge to the development of products due to the various constraints in place. However, the two views are connected by real-life stories of the users, which are shared among the participants.

Lastly, good narratives will enable one to view real users’ preferences and challenges and provide them with the appropriate solutions. Now, let’s illustrate these benefits of UX storytelling with tips and recommendations for its implementation.

Guidelines on How to Make a Good Story

In the process of designing a new digital product, the foundation should be prepared before one puts on the writer’s cap and jumps straight into a story.

• A — Your conditions at the beginning of a process. Go the extra mile to appreciate the challenges that users face in their day-to-day activities and the business environment. To do this, it is required to reveal current pain points in relation to all the audience types and identify the key objectives of the latter.
• B — How should the final result look? Just as important is to see how this future state should look in order to meet the needs of the customers and the company. What changes at the emotional, cognitive, and behavioral levels do you wish to create?
• C – This point leads you from point A to point B, and this is a story. The story links the initial user problem to the solution, filling gaps in people’s information and enabling them to solve their problems with your product.

To get outstanding and meaningful storytelling within your UI/UX design, hire product designers at Linkup Studio. 

Structures for UX Design Storytelling.

The Working Backwards Method is used by Amazon, and it is a strategy that turns the conventional product development process upside down; you begin with envisioning the end goal before setting a course on requirements and implementation.

Let’s assume that you are building a new HR tech SaaS product. Unlike traditional wireframing, you start not with the features but with the rough story of your potential user.

Here are the steps:

1. Visualize the utilization of the end customer and the market offering and condense it into a press release. Perhaps you can describe how your HR tech product would amaze users in terms of making approval of leave requests easy and clear and, at the same time, not burden managers.
2. This concept can be evaluated by using the draft press release to determine whether to consider investing more in this idea. You might consider the need for automated leave management against the need for the development of the system.
3. Find possible design solutions that can be employed to provide the customer experience described in the press release. Conduct interviews with target users about the feasibility of solutions and adapt the solutions according to the feedback obtained. You might think about developing plain one-click approval interfaces that will enable managers to track the employee’s requests and history.
4. With a validated concept, it is now possible to come up with an overall plan of how value will be delivered incrementally. The first phase may be the one where an employee’s request for various types of leaves is automated. The next phase could add more approval workflows for managers, for example. The last phase may include additional HR analytics and customizations to the HR software.

Further, divide the roadmap releases into practical sprints so that the end-users can easily follow.

Investigate the list of the best UX/UI companies to collaborate with in 2024 to create designs for your product that will have a story.