Writing user stories to understand behaviour

Understanding users through writing little stories is a great way to start to identify user needs and behaviors.

Storytelling is built into us, the way we see the world is through stories.

Our brain is hard wired to understand the world as a narrative, consuming information and replaying the information back in a format that is easy to understand.

From a design perspective the ultimate goal for designers is to understand a users needs and behaviors. Opening a sketch book and starting to draw user interfaces focuses your thoughts on the system rather than the user. It also constrains all of your thoughts to the internals of your app or services, you can become very technically led and get too fast into the details of UI elements and design aesthetics.

It’s better to start at the source and answer the following questions:

• What problem am I trying to solve?
• What are the user’s needs?
• What external factors might affect those user needs?
• What internal or external triggers might be present to drive a particular behavior?

The truth is when a user comes to your app or website they have been driven there by some other force or factor. While using your app or services they are in constant contact with the world around them. How can you design the best experience if you don’t take these factors into account?

Writing a narrative isn’t that much different to writing a story, you. invent some characters, a scenario and then tell their story. These narratives can be as short or as long as you like. The important thing to remember is only tell as much story as you need to and try not to get into UI details.

Your stories can and should be based on real research, this can be from your own experiences or experiences of your friends and family. If you have real data or stories from users of your app then that’s great, use those, but if you are designing a new app or service you’re going to have to find research out in the world.

Explore different avenues, where could you take the user? Write bad experiences so that you can analyze them and turn them into good experiences. This is your opportunity to explore all possibilities so don’t hold back and let you mind wander free. You can write so much so quickly you’ll be amazed. Then you can instantly share and get feedback, what do other people think? Can they relate? Maybe they will tell you some stories of their own based on yours!

So what could a story look like? Here’s an example:

Sam needs to pay his friend Martin for lunch. He opens up his banking app and logs in. Once logged in he chooses to pay someone, He has never paid Martin before so the app asks for the name of the person to pay, as Sam starts typing his friends name a list filters all the people that exist in Sams app that have the name Martin. Two results pop, Martin and Marty. Sam recognise Marty is the name of his friend as he has saved him in his contacts. Sam selects Marty, he then types in £20, and types a message “lunch at GBK” and taps pay. The app tells him that the payment has been successful and he closes the app and texts Marty to let him kno he has paid for lunch.

Have a look at the story above, what can you extrapolate from that story and start to sketch how the UI might look, are there any pain points? Maybe you can improve the journey now you know how Sam is behaving. You can do that because you have a better understanding of not only that Sam needs to make a payment but why, also now you can see the way he thinks.

You can also use this method within workshops. Get everyone in the room to tell a personal story, this really helps break the ice and engage the people in the room into solving a particular problem. You can then Annalise them as a group and start to solutionise the problems.

So what are you waiting for? Go and write some stories, you can turn them into comic strips, experience maps and a number of other representations but remember at the core of any good user experience solution is a fundamental understanding of your users, and to understand them you need to listen to their stories.