How to persuade your team with design narrative
A guide to designing narrative and tension to engage with your presentations
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Q: I know that as a design leader, I need to convince others of my vision. So, how do I craft a compelling narrative that is persuading?
Let’s be honest for a second. Design Leaders at most companies wield a lot more influence than any functions; by nature, most CEOs tend to want to build a great product (no bugs 🐞)! Leading solely by authority is not an effective approach and successful design leaders are skilled at crafting great narratives that can persuade people. A small experiment: Just observe any great leader within/outside your organization; you will likely see that they excel at achieving their desired outcomes. The best way to improve how you persuade others is to observe and learn from people who are doing it (consistently). 👀
I was scrolling through my Medium and was recommended a few writings on this topic, and one name kept coming up: Kai Wong, 7xTop writer in UX Design and author of Data-Informed UX Design.
I asked Kai if he’d be up for sharing his article as a guest contributor, and I’m so happy he agreed. Below, Kai shares the six things you need to craft a compelling narrative with design. This is the most actionable and insightful guide for crafting and persuading by designing narrative and storytelling.
A huge thank you to Kai for being so open to sharing! For more from Kai, you can find him on Medium & his book. And give this post a shoutout! 🙏
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Are you ready to dive into the secrets of designing persuasive narratives?
Design storytelling is one of those crucial skills people want, but it’s hard to know exactly how to learn it. Talking about it conjures images of the late Steve Jobs on stage, engaging and persuading the audience with the power of design.
Not to mention, the benefits of telling stories are immense. Not only are you more likely to engage and persuade your audience more easily, but stories are also over 20x easier for people to remember than pure facts.
We often create design artifacts centered on storytelling, such as storyboarding and journey maps, yet it’s not always obvious how to improve at telling stories.
However, it may be easier than you realize. To learn how to tell stories with design, keep one question in mind: what tension is the audience hoping to resolve?
Storytelling in design is about keeping your users in mind
Cole Nussbaumer Knalfic, in her book Storytelling with You, highlights an example of why many presentations fail to engage people and why Designers have an advantage with storytelling.
Imagine how people typically approach creating a presentation. It might typically follow a linear template, such as:
Now think of how many boring presentations you’ve listened to following that format. When you do, one thing should become clear: these presentations are not designed with the audience in mind. Instead, it’s designed to be easy for the presenter to read off their slides in an acceptable manner.
It’s also why we, as Designers, can probably do better: our careers are spent understanding user needs, wants, and frustrations. So designing a presentation with your ‘user’ (i.e., audience) in mind can easily result in more engaging and persuasive presentations that get your audience to take action.
However, storytelling isn’t just useful for presentations.
Design often uses storytelling as part of their process
I won’t touch on them in this article, but here are some other opportunities you might have to leverage storytelling within your design process:
This is the high-level overview of the user’s path, touching on some of the main driving factors, motivations, and emotions behind how a user interacts with your site.
Storytelling can help you engage your team with one person’s journey and where they struggle, or our site doesn’t match what they need. In particular, storytelling can help distinguish between what the business wants customers to do and what they actually do.
In addition, customer journey maps are often polished deliverables you can provide to visualize your user’s path through many different products and departments.
Personas/Use cases/Storyboarding:
How do you create a basic story with steps around how users address and complete specific tasks? I’ve lumped these artifacts together because Storyboarding requires both Personas and Use cases to be fully fleshed out.
While these storyboards may be meant for internal use, engaging your team with the Persona, and the specific context they face, will be the driving factor here.
For example, why does Mary seem to time out a lot while Dave doesn’t? When you establish the context, your team might see that Dave is an expert user who uses our systems constantly, while Mary is a novice senior citizen who spends all her time reading the massive amount of text on the site.
User stories are one of the smallest tasks that leverage storytelling and sometimes one of the most important. These small stories fit into Agile backlogs and tracking software, which are features people can accomplish within sprints.
However, the main storytelling element is keeping these stories user-centric and tying together the larger picture within the backlog.
Regardless, all of these processes have storytelling elements within them, and even though we’re focusing on presentations, they should all follow a basic 3-step process. That process starts with a question: Who is your audience, and who are you prioritizing?