Storytelling masterclass for designers 💡

Summary

Dive Club 🤿: Storytelling Masterclass for Designers 💡

Release Date: November 25, 2024
Host: Ridd

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In the latest episode of Dive Club, host Ridd delves deep into the art of storytelling tailored specifically for designers. Titled "Storytelling Masterclass for Designers 💡", this episode unpacks the pivotal role storytelling plays in the design process, offering actionable insights and techniques from some of the industry's leading professionals. Whether you're a seasoned designer or just starting out, this episode promises to enhance your ability to communicate ideas effectively and ensure your designs not only solve problems but also resonate with your audience.

1. The Critical Role of Storytelling in Design

The episode opens with Gavin Nelson emphasizing the foundational importance of storytelling in design:

"You could spend your whole life learning storytelling, and it'll be the most important design skill, I think, that anyone can learn." [00:00]

Echoing this sentiment, Ian Wharton underscores that even the most sophisticated interfaces require compelling narratives to gain approval and adoption:

"You can create the most effective interfaces in the world, but as Gavin Nelson says, that's only part of the job... convincing the team of people you're working with that this is the right thing to build in this way at this time." [00:05]

Without effective storytelling, exceptional designs risk remaining unnoticed and unimplemented:

"May ship if you don't have that." [00:35]

2. Demystifying Storytelling for Designers

While storytelling is universally acknowledged as vital, Yuen Wang points out its vague nature, advocating for a more disciplined approach:

"Everyone will just say you need storytelling... we can be much more disciplined about it." [00:51]

The episode aims to translate storytelling from an abstract concept into practical techniques that designers can readily apply to their work.

3. Practical Storytelling Techniques

a. Creating Shareable Ideas with Memes

Ian Wharton introduces the concept of memes as a tool for distilling ideas into concise, memorable, and shareable formats:

"A meme is simply a method of distilling an idea into a format that is one, concise, two memorable, and three, shareable." [01:31]

Alex Cornell shares an example from his experience at GitHub, where he used a three-panel comic to highlight issues with the contribution graph. This visual storytelling not only conveyed the problem effectively but also became easily shareable within presentations and discussions:

"My comic just like told that story in three panels... and then that thing just like, proliferates." [02:13]

b. Naming Concepts for Clarity and Recall

Naming design concepts can significantly enhance their memorability and ease of communication. Alex Cornell and Yuen Wang discuss how giving unique names to design elements facilitates better understanding and discussion within teams.

Yuen Wang recounts her experience at Maven, where naming a new feature "CL Peak" helped the team quickly reference and discuss the concept, leading to its successful implementation:

"She gave the concept a name. She called it the CL Peak... the concept of CLP quickly gained popularity and the feature was shipped shortly after." [04:32]

Gavin Nelson adds that naming entities provides a common vocabulary, especially in asynchronous communication:

"This gives people a vocabulary that they can use in their asynchronous message back." [05:02]

c. Utilizing Inciting Incidents to Capture Attention

To make stories memorable, incorporating an inciting incident—a pivotal moment that triggers change—is crucial. Yuen Wang explains this narrative element and its significance in design storytelling:

"Inciting incident is single most crucial part of any story that serves one function, which is to arrest your attention." [05:24]

Ian Wharton illustrates how integrating inciting incidents can make design pitches more compelling. For instance, Metalab leveraged the pandemic as a transformative event to frame their Upwork redesign, making the narrative relatable and urgent:

"Stories are memorable. Facts and features, not so much... it's a way to make it interesting." [06:11]

4. Understanding and Tailoring to Your Audience

A recurring theme in the episode is the importance of knowing your audience. Femke shares her experience at Uber, highlighting the need to align storytelling with the audience's priorities:

"Knowing what their goals are, what they really care about, what their level of altitude is in the company." [10:49]

Alex Cornell complements this by using the Rubik's Cube analogy, emphasizing that different stakeholders focus on different aspects of a design. By understanding which "side" to present, designers can ensure their message resonates:

"People are very different. They all see different sides of a Rubik's Cube... you have to learn which side to show them." [11:30]

5. Drawing Inspiration from Diverse Sources

To enhance storytelling skills, designers are encouraged to draw inspiration from various fields. Kathy Zhang shares how she integrates techniques from comedy and filmmaking into her presentations, making her storytelling more engaging:

"I spend a lot of time consuming content from comedians. I love film... I feel more comfortable pulling a technique that I see a filmmaker do into an all-hands presentation." [12:11]

6. Enhancing Storytelling through Data and Context

Effective storytelling in design isn't just about the narrative but also about grounding it in data and real-world context. Noam Sehgal discusses the importance of pairing insights with the underlying pain points to make them more compelling:

"Your insights become a lot more compelling when the pain that led to them is also just as clear." [08:04]

By clearly articulating the challenges that led to a design insight, designers can ensure their audience understands the significance and necessity of their proposals.

7. Conclusion: Integrating Storytelling into Design Practice

The episode wraps up by reinforcing that storytelling is not an ancillary skill but a core component of effective design. By adopting techniques such as naming concepts, incorporating inciting incidents, understanding the audience, and drawing inspiration from various sources, designers can elevate their work from mere functionality to impactful, memorable experiences.

Ridd closes by encouraging listeners to deepen their understanding and application of storytelling in design, ensuring continuous learning and improvement within the design community.

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Key Takeaways:

• Storytelling is Essential: Beyond creating functional designs, storytelling ensures that ideas are communicated effectively and adopted by teams.

• Practical Techniques:

  • Memes: Use concise and shareable formats to distill ideas.
  • Naming: Assigning unique names to concepts aids in communication and recall.
  • Inciting Incidents: Incorporate pivotal moments to make stories compelling.

• Audience Awareness: Tailor your narrative to align with the priorities and perspectives of your audience.

• Diverse Inspirations: Leverage techniques from other fields like comedy and filmmaking to enhance storytelling.

• Data-Driven Stories: Support narratives with data and contextual insights to reinforce their validity and importance.

For those looking to refine their storytelling skills in design, this episode serves as an invaluable resource, blending theoretical insights with practical applications to foster more effective and impactful design communication.

Transcript

[Gavin Nelson]

You could spend your whole life learning storytelling, and it'll be the most important design skill, I think, that anyone can learn.

[Ian Wharton]

This has been a common thread over the course of the last 80 or so interviews. You can create the most effective interfaces in the world, but as Gavin Nelson says, that's only part of the job. Your job as a designer may be to, like, solve these problems and build these user experiences that, like, let someone get a job done. But the second part of your job is convincing the team of people you're working with that this is the right thing to build in this way at this time. I think you can do a lot of great work and none of it.

[Kathy Zhang]

May ship if you don't have that.

[Ian Wharton]

Second part of the skillset. If you're listening to this, then you probably already know that storytelling is one of the most important tools that we as designers have at our disposal. But I don't know about you. Sometimes I'm like, man, what does it actually mean to be good at storytelling?

[Yuen Wang]

Everyone will just say you need storytelling. And like, the flippant thing I always say is, that's as helpful as saying, if you're building a house, just use bricks. It's so vague and unhelpful, and we can be much more disciplined about it.

[Ian Wharton]

So the goal of this episode is to make storytelling just a little bit more practical by breaking down some of the techniques that the best designers are using to present their work. So let's start by hearing a bit more from designer and storytelling coach Ian Wharton.

[Yuen Wang]

If you're selling an idea to a client or internally, chances are you get one shot to say it how you want to say it, and then you're dependent on that person to re articulate your idea in your absence.

[Ian Wharton]

Oftentimes, it's the second conversation where people either buy into your idea or they send it to the grave. It's that Q3 planning call where your product lead brings up your demo. From last week to leadership. That's why the key to effective storytelling is making sure your ideas are easily shared. Kind of like a meme. Now, I know when you hear the word meme, you probably think of Distracted Boyfriend or Futurama Fry or maybe the Drake Grid. But if we abstract what's really happening, a meme is simply a method of distilling an idea into a format that is one, concise, two memorable, and three, shareable. That's why I think we can learn a lot from this story. From Kathy zhang's time at GitHub, I.

[Alex Cornell]

Remember when I was like Creating designs around the GitHub user profile. It was just like me trying to explain the problems around the profile that I was observing. First comic I made was this story that one of my peers who worked at GitHub told me where she wears her GitHub hoodie. And she was on an airplane, had her laptop open and she was like looking at her GitHub profile and somebody passed her on the plane and she said that they asked her, oh, do you work at GitHub? And she was like, yes. And then the person was like, oh, but your graph, it's like not very green. Like there's not enough commits on your contribution graph. And then she just felt so gutted. So my comic just like told that story in three panels. I just anchored the whole, like, okay, here's like the problem with the contribution graph and the problem it creates in the community and why people are like, so polarized on it. It's an example of how to condense that story into a format that maybe has the chance to meme itself. People will screenshot it and include it in other presentations when they're talking about a thing that is anchoring to the same problem or same user story. And then that thing just like, proliferates.

[Ian Wharton]

Memes don't have to be images either. I mean, Dieter Ram's design philosophy can be summed up in three words as a meme less, but better. And that's why the language that we use to present our design concepts is so important.

[Alex Cornell]

I think sometimes it's helpful to name your explorations so that it's easy for people to grasp. Like, oh, this is the drawer concept.

[Femke]

And that is the sheet.

[Ian Wharton]

That's Yuen Wang, who was a design lead at Twitter Airbnb and now is the head of design at Maven. And I remember specifically when Yuan was leading a project to redesign the Maven marketplace. Now she used data to shine a light on some potential opportunities. One of the problem she wanted to solve was making it easier for students to get the gist of a course without having to navigate to what we would call the CLPs, how we refer to course landing pages on Maven. So at our weekly demos, she showed off a pretty nifty pop up like this. People liked the prototype, but she did something really genius while presenting it. She gave the concept a name. She called it the CL Peak. It was perfect because her prototype was a way for students to get a quick look, or dare I say, a peek into a course.

[Alex Cornell]

Then it's easy for them to also talk about them.

[Ian Wharton]

Sure enough, the idea behind CLP caught like wildfire, because now, in only three syllables, anyone on the team could reference her prototype and all of the surrounding conversation data points, everything from that meeting. And as a result, the concept of CLP quickly gained popularity and the feature was shipped shortly after. But it's not just un. I talked with Alex Cornell about his time designing the Linear mobile app, and he shared the same tactic.

[Gavin Nelson]

You're now referring to these things as named entities, and maybe sometimes it's even.

[Ian Wharton]

Worth giving them a name.

[Gavin Nelson]

You know, this is the no menu option, this is the gestural option or whatever. Then it gives people a vocabulary that they can use in their asynchronous message back.

[Ian Wharton]

Now, naming your concepts is a great tactic, but if you really want your ideas to stick with people, then you need to nail the inciting incident.

[Yuen Wang]

Inciting incident is single most crucial part of any story that serves one function, which is to arrest your attention. And the inciting incident is the moment that happens almost always within the first 20% of a film or a story that turns the hero's world on its head. It's this major opposing force, the first major piece of conflict that the hero faces and then has to take action to try and overcome to address this major upheaval. Now, if you think about that and you care about the design and presence of the inciting incident, everything else you need comes out of it. So the inciting incident only matters if you create the world beforehand. So if you establish the world of the story and then you need to articulate your way to a resolution.

[Ian Wharton]

Stories are memorable. Facts and features, not so much. It's why when Metalab was pitching ideas for the Upwork redesign, they leaned into how the pandemic forced companies to adapt to remote work.

[Gavin Nelson]

To a certain point, you mimic the vibe of describing a movie in the same way that you describe a certain, let's say, piece of context, like the reason we're here. In the case of upwork, it's like the pandemic has just suddenly changed everything almost overnight. And so many people are now working from home and learning that in a way that they wouldn't have been doing before. And to be able to use that and to intersperse, whether it's visually on slides like animated gifs from movies that reinforce the emotion of the moment you're trying to describe, or whether it's just like mimicking not the tone of a movie trailer, but just some of the familiar paces. It's, you know, humans consume storytelling all the time. And it's just a way to make it interesting. Like I think a boring conversation about product or a boring presentation is probably the death of good ideas. Even world changing stuff, if you just crawl through it in a linear, methodical way, will just, you know, you'll lose your collaborators and your audience.

[Ian Wharton]

Inciting incidents exist in the micro too. Maybe there's an unexpected change in the data or maybe you identify an emotional high point where users feel anxious or overwhelmed in a given flow. Now you can use that as a way to tell a story that makes your designs more memorable. First you create the user's world beforehand, then you really highlight that moment of conflict and then you can propose your solution. So going back to our Q3 planning meeting, internalizing this moment of conflict is what empowers your product lead to effectively tell your story.

[Yuen Wang]

If you arm your person with the major piece of conflict and the way to overcome it, they are more able to rearticulate that idea onwards.

[Ian Wharton]

It reminds me of when research leader Noam Sehgal explained his framework for the pain insight equilibrium.

[Noam Sehgal]

Your insights become a lot more compelling when the pain that led to them is also just as clear. Let's say I'm a researcher at Duolingo, just did some research on this math product that's about to come out and I have insights. You know, like we need to include this feature. One option would be to just TLDR it, just share that insight. Hello executives. We need to put this feature for math learning in the product. That's the short version. You want the bottom line. That's the bottom line. Anyone from Duolingo, CEO, their executive team, down to every single IC on every single product team working on this math products will feel a lot more compelled to act on it and will internalize the insight a lot better. When the pain points that led to it is just as clear. How did we get to this insight? How did we get here? The brain craves that real quick message.

[Ian Wharton]

And then we can jump back into it. So I've been using this new product to do research called genway. It uses AI powered interviewers to help you gather qualitative data at basically an in infinite scale. So I've actually been interviewing listeners of this show all over the world. I tell the AI what I'm hoping to learn and then it has a dynamic conversation with each person. Genway then organizes all of the key insights for me automatically. So I learned more in a two week study than I had in a year and a half prior. Needless to say, I am totally Hooked. And if you want to take your research to the next level, head to Dive Club Slash Genway to get two months free. That's G E N W A Y There's been a lot of talk recently on this show about the power of designers who can ship. And that's why I'm so excited about a new product called Dessen. It allows you to ship design changes, but you don't have to write the code, just open up your live app. Their extension overlays a figma like interface so that you can easily make design changes and then their AI writes all the code and pushes it to to your GitHub for you. That means you as a designer can now contribute directly to production. It's a pretty big deal and you can start today. Head to dive club/desn that's D E S S n Another theme that keeps coming up on Dive Club is the importance of knowing your audience and tailoring your story accordingly. Here's Femke sharing a quick story from her time at Uber.

[Femke]

My number one tactic or recommendation for improving your storytelling or trying to get your ideas bought in easier is knowing your audience, knowing what their goals are, what they really care about, what their level of altitude is in the company. I remember back in my time at Uber, I was trying to tell a story to a senior product executive at the company and I went like to ground zero. I was like, okay, all the context setting and it took less than two minutes before he stopped me and he was like, I get it. Let's see the outcomes.

[Ian Wharton]

Kathy Zhang also gave one of my favorite analogies ever shared on this show to go just a little bit deeper on this idea.

[Alex Cornell]

Some people really cared about metrics and qualitative anecdotes from users. Some people really cared about the perfect pixel view of that potential product. And the most helpful insight that I received from my head of design, Max Schoening, was this analogy he gave me, which is people are very different. They all see different sides of a Rubik's Cube. You have to learn which side to show them so that they realize that when you're talking about an idea, you're actually talking about the same thing.

[Ian Wharton]

If you're like me, then you're constantly looking for and saving design inspiration. But we can take that same practice and apply it to storytelling too. Here's Gabe Valdivia to land the plane.

[Kathy Zhang]

If I were to go back, I would put more effort into finding reference points that show me what good storytelling is. Today I spend a lot of time consuming content from comedians. I love film. I love reading. All of that influences what I can do as a designer. And maybe in the past I thought of those as like separate worlds where now I feel like there's more overlap between those worlds and I feel more comfortable pulling a technique that I see a filmmaker do into a all hands presentation.

[Ian Wharton]

Hey, it's Rid. Don't forget if you want to go even deeper. Each week I send an email out to over 10,000 designers with bonus resources and key takeaways from these conversations. So head to Dive Club slash email to sign up. Okay, I'll see you next week.