There are myriads of stories around us, heard or unheard, seen or unseen. And it’s impossible to hear them all but the heard ones, they influence us in a certain way, form our opinions, our view of the World, our view of Life.

I used to write short stories because I wanted to tell stories that catch people’s minds and hearts. And I’ve always loved a blank unwritten page — so many possible stories you could write. The reason why I write my posts here @Medium is similar. I’m motivated by the simple sentence you can see here when you open a blank post.

Tell your story

A story should have a structure. The structure helps you to lead your story and tell your listeners the essence of story. How the structure should looks like it often differs from a Storyteller to a Storyteller.

I wrote down some rules I got from lectures of Human-Centered Design by Scott Klemmer, from University of California, San Diego.

Every story should convey setting — describes people who are involved, describes environment in which you can observe these people.

Every story should convey sequence — describes steps which people make to accomplish their tasks and what leads them to do that.

And every story should convey satisfaction — describes what people motivate to act and how they react and response.

Everyone can be a Storyteller

A format what you use to tell your story to people is also important. It can be a poem, a song, a short story or a novel. But you needn’t to be an artist to tell your story, it can be a simple anecdote or an experience you say in common conversation when you drink ale with your friends in a cozy irish pub.

Really everybody can be a Storyteller, it’s natural for us. When you chit chat with your friends, yeah, you can talk about weather or sport. But talking about what happened others, our friends especially, it’s just much more fun. I guess you know what I mean. Nothing prove more our nature to storytelling as gossips and rumours which we love spreading around us.

Our another nature is we better understand things in a visual form. Even if we don’t speak other person’s language, we can draw a picture to understand. And here it comes a format called the storyboard.

Storyboard is a serie of small windows describing people and their stories. And it’s a great way how to tell your story. You needn’t to know how to draw, it doesn’t matter, it needn’t to be a perfect picture. It’s only important if your storyboard tells your story correctly.

Solutions to our problems

As a designer I think it’s good when you are a Storyteller because you want to design a great story which people will experience with your product. In fact when you call yourself UX Designer, you don’t design a product, you design the experience.

In my first little interview I talked with my friend Johny about transportation. As my second assignment in my online course I should take some inspiration from the interview and come up with three ideas how to improve transportation experience. And for better describing of this three ideas I should make a storyboard, even two for each idea.

Unfortunately I got only one idea from our interview and it’s the last one I will show you here. It’s more a fun idea than a practical one.

For the first two idea I have got inspired from my girlfriend and from colleagues at work and I created two personas. The persona is an archetype of some typical users, customers or behaviour.

Zoey is a typical student who really doesn’t like to get up to school every morning so she is often late.

Jamie is an officer, working in a large company. He goes home every day at the same time and he takes an overcrowded bus to home because he doesn’t own a car.

At all my storyboards I describe same typical daily routine for Zoey and for Jamie. But I also describe three solution for them. At all my storyboards there are weird sketches of people. These sketches are called Star People and it’s a proof that doesn’t matter if you can draw, still you can be a Storyteller.

Magic Information Board

My first idea was the Magic Information Board. This board would take a place at every bus stop and it would communicate with buses. When you arrive at this stop, you can check all information about buses at the Magic Information Board.

You can see a map with your bus stop and buses around so you know if you came late or not. Or you can touch on a icon of arriving bus and it shows you more detail information about this one — it’s late or not, it has good proposition for disabled people or hasn’t.

Magic Information App

The second idea is little similar to the first one but this time it’s an app, Magic Information App to your smart phone or even better for your smart watch. I was inspired by a quite new aproach — the Internet of Things.

From my point of view, basics of the Internet of Things lie in inter-device communication. In our case you arrive at a bus stop and you get a notification from the bus stop to your app. It again shows you if a bus is delayed or you can check how crowded it is.

This solution might be slightly more difficult than the first one but the technology move fast, one of examples is beacon — an option how to deliver this inter-device communication.

Now I think the best solution would be a combination of these two. You get a notification to your Magic Information App at your smart watch, you see the bus hasn’t passed yet so you check his location on a map at the Magic Information Board.

Magic Information Booth

This last idea comes from our interview with Johny. He doesn’t like going by any type of transportion so for him and similar others I describe this solution — Magic Information Booth.

You arrive at a bus stop but it’s not a typical bus stop, there is no bench or no schedule. But there is a booth! You can imagine a typical english telephone booth or TARDIS from TV series Doctor Who.

Yeah, my last idea is the Teleport! It doesn’t exist yet and it seems it won’t be for a long time but you never know.

Hint: If you look closer at the last storyboard and the Jamie’s one you can see satisfaction for both my characters :)