Abstract
Storytelling is a key component of user experience (UX) design practice. However, while storytelling is universally acknowledged as important, what exactly is meant by storytelling is elastic. This elasticity makes it hard to explain and teach to emerging practitioners. In this research paper, we propose a data-derived definition to bring more understanding to the concept of storytelling in UX. The contribution of this work is a multifaceted definition of storytelling in UX that can be used as a heuristic to help make it more meaningful and understandable to students and early career professionals. We conclude by providing strategies to incorporate the storytelling heuristic into UX pedagogy.
Introduction
Since this is a paper about storytelling, we wanted to start with a story of our own. We all teach user experience (UX) design-related courses in higher education at three different universities in the US. Over the past five years, we have engaged in a project to understand current UX practices in industry and, in turn, consider how these practices can inform teaching UX in higher education. In one of our early publications from this project, we documented the myriad skills required to work in UX derived from interviews with 71 senior UX practitioners in 64 organizations (Rose et al., 2024). We then developed a skill inventory exercise to include in our teaching to help students assess and reflect on their skills (Rose et al., 2024). When students completed this activity, there was one skill that they were particularly curious about. That skill was storytelling. Students felt like they were unsure what it meant, how they could assess their skills, and how to improve. As a result, our next research study was born. The following questions guided our exploratory study:
How do UX practitioners describe the role of storytelling in their work? How do UX practitioners perceive and describe their storytelling skills? How can a deeper understanding of storytelling inform our teaching and help prepare students for their future UX careers?
The field of technical and professional communication has a clear and continued overlap with the practice of UX (Redish, 2010; Redish & Barnum, 2011; Rose & Schreiber, 2021). The overlaps between UX and TPC include document design, audience analysis, task analysis, plain language, and the development of empirical methods such as usability testing to better understand people and their needs (Rose, 2025). Recent work has also turned to investigating UX in practice (MacDonald et al., 2022, Putnam et al., 2016; Rose et al., 2020; Rose & Tenenberg, 2016, 2017) and UX pedagogy (Gonzales & Turner, 2019; Hunter, 2024; Lee et al., 2023; Rose et al., 2024; Rose & Turner, 2025).
In this article, we first provide a brief background on the role and history of storytelling in design and UX. Second, we explain the methods of our research study that detail how we investigated storytelling through surveys and interviews with design practitioners. Third, we provide findings that propose five distinct, yet connected, purposes of storytelling in UX. To demonstrate these purposes at work, we also share a series of emblematic examples from the data that demonstrate successful and unsuccessful stories from design practice. Fourth, we discuss the findings that help explore and explain the multifaceted role of storytelling, its connection to empathy, why solely relying on data is not enough, and the importance of engaging audiences and we discuss implications for teaching and practice. Finally, we conclude with limitations and suggestions for future work.
The primary contributions of this work are twofold. First, we present a multifaceted definition of storytelling to help address the elastic and malleable nature of the concept. This definition is based on data from UX practitioners and intends to capture the nuanced ways that the term storytelling is used and talked about in UX practice. Second, we share implications for teaching and practice to support students and emerging professionals with storytelling skills.
Background
Stories are seen as a way to communicate within and across groups of diverse stakeholders. As Vealey & Gerding state, “stories are arguably one of the most effective ways of communicating complex technical and scientific information” (2021, p. 1). Stories fulfill “a human need to make meaning and to forge connections between seemingly disparate bits of knowledge and experience” (Blyler & Perkins, 1999, p. 245), and storytelling activities help create common cultures. In this section, we first discuss the role of storytelling within engineering design and then move on to talk more specifically about the role of storytelling in UX design.
Storytelling in Engineering
Given that engineering design is a rich social process (Bucciarelli, 1988) and a social collaborative activity (Erickson, 1996), storytelling is key to getting things done (Lloyd, 2000). In his ethnographic study on engineers, Lloyd demonstrated that storytelling functions to bring the social and technical together. As he states, A narrative, or story, provides a way in which a designer can explain what they actually do, specifically. This is not to say that models of the design process are divisive. It is just to say that as an explanation for design or, to be more accurate, how the designer explains their design process to other designers, they are insufficient. Rather a model provides a rhetorical structure; a story evidences personal experience. (Lloyd, 2000, p. 366)
Within engineering design, Song et al. define storytelling as “establishing a coherent story about the design process and the designed artefact by bringing coherence to the perspectives and interests of each design team member” (2003, p. 1). Not only do stories bring coherence to the design process, but they also reflect the conflicting viewpoints, reconciliations, and agreements of the design team. There is a great deal of literature exploring narrative and argumentation in design (Curtis & Berdanier, 2023; Gray, 2018; Grimaldi et al., 2013). Further storytelling, and more broadly, communication is key for novice designers, especially when sharing designs and prototypes (Krishnakumar et al., 2022).
Storytelling in User Experience
Here, we want to make a distinction between engineering design and UX design, which are related but not equivalent. UX design, according to Turner & Rose (2022), building on Buley (2013), is defined as three things: an interdisciplinary practice informed by a variety of disciplines, an iterative process that includes a set of methods and techniques for understanding users’ needs, and an outcome, or the overall effect and impact resulting from the interactions a person has from interacting with a design.
The concept of storytelling has a long history connected to experience design. In the early 2000 as UX design was emerging as a concept and field. Forlizzi & Ford discussed the idea that the experience in UX could be understood as story, stating “because experience as story is naturally communicative, it has relevance for sharing user findings with a design team of various disciplines” (2000, p. 429). UX is often considered a subdiscipline with the larger engineering design process and the one that is the smallest. Some reports estimate that the ratio of designers to software engineers in industry is 1:10 (Kaplan, 2020) or 1:20 (Sauro, 2017). The size of the discipline is important, as the name of Buley's (2013) book, The UX Team of One, speaks to the fact that people in UX are often working solo within larger engineering teams. Given both the size and the relative newness of UX as a discipline and practice within organizations, we argue that storytelling has a unique or special role in UX practice.
Within UX, several practitioners have written books that examine and provide advice about the practice of storytelling within the field. In their book, Storytelling for User Experience, authors Quesenbery and Brooks (2010), explain that stories are key for presenting design work or sharing features, but most importantly to “keep people at the center of your work” (p. 2) and they help bridge the different disciplines that are engaged in design work within organizations. In her book, Storytelling for Design, Anna Dahlström identifies several roles of storytelling in the design process, including designing the product itself by thinking through frameworks and tools for how a product's experience should be designed, as a tool for getting buy-in with stakeholders, and as a way to understand the people we are designing for (Dahlström, 2019). Tom Greever, who wrote Articulating Design Decisions, does not refer to the practice of storytelling or narrative, but rather focuses on how designers explain their work to others. He articulates the purpose of the book to “help designers be better communicators” (Greever, 2015, p. 2). The themes in Greever's work directly connect to the ideas from the other two industry texts: communicating across differences with the goal of achieving buy-in or agreement. Much of that he attributes to the growth and newness of UX he states, “The growth of the UX designer has changed our role in so many ways, none more so than the need to explain ourselves to other people that don’t share our experience in design” (p. 9).
While these industry publications point to the fact that storytelling is a key skill, as does previous empirical research with industry practitioners (Rose et al., 2020), we and others have found that the actual concept of storytelling is a malleable one, even fuzzy and open to interpretation (Grimaldi et al., 2013). While many people working in UX agree that storytelling is important, there is no precise definition that explains what practitioners mean by storytelling in UX. In previous work, we have referred to this phenomenon as the elasticity of storytelling (MacDonald et al., 2024).
To clarify the concept of storytelling, we turn to two of the popular industry books on storytelling in UX (Dahlström, 2019; Quesenbery & Brooks, 2010). Each source defines the role or purpose of storytelling in overlapping ways. In their book, Storytelling for User Experience, Quesenbury and Brooks claim that storytelling in UX is important because it helps UX professionals move beyond the idea that they are just transferring information but rather actively engaging others through communicating contextual information and developing connections.
They describe several roles, or functions, of stories in the UX process (Quesenbery & Brooks, 2010, pp. 36–52):
Explain—describes behavior, emotions, context, motivations, and goals. Engage the imagination and spark new ideas—helps the listener make leaps that surpass linear logic and inspires the audience to think about solutions in new ways. Create a shared understanding—helps reveal different perspectives and help people on a team see the problem or solutions in a new way. Persuade—creating a vision that others want to be part of.
In her 2019 book, Storytelling in Design, Dahlström concludes the book, by summarizing four roles of storytelling (pp. 355–368):
Achieve a desired outcome—having a specific purpose in mind and includes a call to action. Getting buy-in—having others support an idea, design, or direction. In addition to getting buy-in, stories can help understand why buy in does not exist. A way to inspire—help others see differently, capturing their attention, or creating motivation. Sharing data—being able to bring about insights from both qualitative and quantitative data.
Across and within these two texts, the roles of storytelling overlap and are not mutually exclusive. Stories can embody one or more of these roles depending on the context. While these books are written by practicing UX professionals, we were interested to see how a study of UX practitioners could help further define the role of storytelling in their work. To do so, we designed a study to explore how storytelling is defined and practiced in UX.
Methods
In the following section, we detail the methods of our exploratory study, including recruitment of participants, data collection, and analysis. The study design was reviewed and approved by University of Washington, reference number: STUDY00007827 and Depaul University, reference number: CP0403317CDM. Informed consent was received for all participants who took part in this research.
Participants
As part of a larger study to investigate current UX practice in industry, we created a pool of practitioners who worked in US-based companies. We recruited and managed the pool with the use of a web-based tool. Between October 2022 and February 2023, we recruited our pool participants using snowball methods through our personal networks, previous studies, and through social media. We also encouraged participants to send the invite to qualified acquaintances. When signing up for the pool, participants were asked to complete pre-screen questions which asked them (a) about their work experience, (b) demographics, and (c) whether they were willing to participate in future studies. Among the 189 people who initially signed up for the pool, 131 completed the pre-screen survey and agreed that we could contact them for future studies (see Figure 1).
Participants in the Research Pool by Role and Experience.
In March 2023, we invited those 131 participants to participate in a survey on “Storytelling in the context of UX” and received 62 responses. Among the 62 responders, the mean age of participants was 37.8 years (ranging from 25 to 57). Most (n = 32, 52%) identified as she/her, 20 (32%) as he/him, with the remaining 10 (16%) declining to answer the question. Most respondents (n = 52, 84%) were in the US (spanning 18 different states) with the remaining 10 from other parts of the world that included Canada (n = 2), Germany (n = 2), India (n = 2), New Zealand (n = 2), UK (n = 1), and Argentina (n = 1).
A majority of respondents (n = 48, 77%) worked at organizations as part of an in-house team, 19% identified as consultants either at agencies (n = 8) or self-employed (n = 4) and two respondents listed “other.” Years of experience as a UX practitioner varied from two years or less (n = 6, 10%), three to five years (n = 17, 27%), six to 10 years (n = 17, 27%), 11–20 years (n = 14, 23%), and 21 years or over (n = 8, 13%). Finally, most of the respondents worked as researchers (n = 35, 56%), 24 (39%) worked in a mix of design and research, and only three (5%) identified their role as sole designers.
Among the 62 participants who responded to the survey, we chose nine for follow-up, semi-structured interviews to explore UX storytelling in more depth. The nine interview participants were selected based on several factors. First, we selected participants for follow-up interviews that gave rich or detailed responses to the survey question that defined UX storytelling that were a sentence or longer. Second, we selected participants with a range of years of experience and different job titles. See Figure 2 for a summary of the survey and interview participants’ roles and time in UX practice.
Survey and Interview Participants by Role and Experience.
Data Collection
In the storytelling survey, we started by asking an open-ended question: “In the context of UX, what does storytelling mean to you?” We then asked a series of Likert-scale questions (1–5) about the importance of storytelling in their work, how often they used storytelling, and asked them to rank their storytelling skills. We also asked about the importance of storytelling in a variety of work situations. We then asked how often they relied on their storytelling skills when interacting with various audiences, including high-level executives. Last, we asked them to rank how challenging they found aspects of storytelling, e.g., tailoring a story to a specific audience.
While we asked multiple questions in the follow-up interviews, in this paper, we focused on three questions, the first of which asked participants to expand on the open-ended survey question (we repeated their response first). We then asked two questions about an experience at work in which they had used storytelling techniques: (1) Tell us about a time in which storytelling was a success and helped you achieve your goal(s) and (2) Tell us about a time in which storytelling was not a success and did not achieve your goal(s).
The survey took about 30 min to complete. Participants were sent a $15.00 gift certificate for completing the survey. The follow-up interviews were about 60 min long, and participants were given a $50.00 gift certificate for their participation. The interviews consisted of 12 open-ended questions that asked about the participants background, experience, and current organizational context in addition to questions that focused on defining storytelling and asked them to share stories of when they had used storytelling in their UX positions which yielded positive and negative results.
Data Analysis
In this section, we describe our survey and interview analysis methods.
Survey Analysis
We analyzed the Likert-scale questions descriptively. Our analysis of the open-ended question, ‘In the context of UX, what does storytelling mean to you?’ began by creating an initial codebook based on the purpose of roles as defined by in UX: Storytelling in Design (Dahlström, 2019, pp. 355–368) and Storytelling for the User Experience (Quesenbery & Brooks, 2010, pp. 36–52). We used the concepts that we identified in the literature and discussed in the background section and summarized them in Table 1. We chose to use these concepts to code the data because we were specifically interested in looking at how practitioner defined concepts related to storytelling show up in the ways in which practitioners define storytelling.
Purpose and Role of Storytelling as Derived From the UX-Related Literature.
After discussing the purposes for storytelling from the literature, we added a fifth purpose/role category that we had identified from our respondents: “Empathize with users” (Table 2).
Storytelling Purpose: Codes and Definitions.
To conduct a sound analysis, each of the three authors coded the data independently for the five purpose codes in the survey responses. We then conducted a Fleiss's Kappa test to evaluate inter-rater reliability (Fleiss, 1971). Our initial average interrater reliability across all five purposes was “moderate” (kappa = .46, p < .001). We then met to further refine the codebook, resulting in more precise definitions of the codes. We proceeded with a second round of binary coding. Using Fleiss's Kappa, our average interrater reliability improved to “good” (kappa = .62, p < .001), indicating we were interpreting the codebook similarly. The kappa scores for the individual purpose/role categories ranged from moderate (.41−.60), to good (.61−.80), to very good (.81–1.00):
Share data, kappa = .59, p < .001 (high moderate) Engage, kappa = .55, p < .001 (moderate) Align, kappa = .48, p < .001 (moderate) Persuade, kappa = .61, p < .001 (good) Empathize, kappa = .89, p < .001 (very good)
We then conducted a third round of coding to discuss each individual submission to attain 100% agreement and continued to refine and clarify the definition of each code which is discussed further in the findings.
Finally, to further examine the clarity of the definitions we selected for coding, we asked a student researcher who was not involved in the project to code the responses based on our refined codebook. Our average interrater reliability with the student researcher was high moderate (kappa = .57, p < .001). The kappa scores for the individual purpose/role categories were as follows:
Share data, kappa = .88, p < .001 (very good) Engage, kappa = .41, p < .001 (moderate) Align, kappa = .28, p < .05 (fair) Persuade, kappa = .59, p < .001 (high moderate) Empathize, kappa = .72, p < .001 (very good)
In our analysis, we noted that the Align code had the least agreement, ranking at fair. To understand if it was a unique concept, we looked at co-occurrence and saw very little overlap between all the codes. As is detailed in the findings, the lack of co-occurrence led us to conclude that each of the codes in the codebook was capturing unique aspects of storytelling.
Interview Analysis
Using our refined purpose codebook from the open-ended survey analysis, we deductively coded the three interview questions that focused on storytelling practice that we considered for this paper: (1) expand on their response to the survey question, “In the context of UX, what does storytelling mean to you?” And to share a time in which (2) storytelling was successful in their work, and (3) storytelling was unsuccessful. We chose these three interview questions because they helped expand the definitions gathered in the survey and provided rich descriptions of storytelling in practice. Analyzing the responses to the elaborated definition of storytelling and their successful and unsuccessful storytelling examples, we read and reviewed the transcripts to see how the codes could be applied to each instance. We intentionally chose several examples that showed a variety of codes in larger contextual stories to share in this analysis.
Findings
In this section, we first summarize our findings about the importance of storytelling from the survey. We then present our findings about the purposes of storytelling in UX practice and include quotes from both the survey and the interviews. Finally, we present three vignettes of storytelling in practice from our interviews.
The Importance of Storytelling
Our respondents rated the importance of storytelling in their work at a mean of 4.71/5 (median = 5). They ranked their storytelling skills at a mean of 3.62/5 (median = 4) and reported that on average in the last month they used storytelling in their work about 2–3 times a week.
Recall, we also asked respondents to assess the situational importance of storytelling in their work. Presenting themselves or their work in job interviews was ranked the highest (mean = 4.80/5, median = 5), followed by presenting research findings (mean = 4.77/5, median = 5). Using storytelling to help collaborate with the UX team (mean = 3.85/5, median = 4) and developers were both ranked the lowest (mean = 3.75/5, median = 4) (see Figure 3).
Situational Importance of Storytelling.
When asked to rank who they most commonly employed their storytelling skills as part of their communication, the most common were clients for those who worked at agencies (mean = 4.61/5, median = 5) and high-level executives (mean = 4.49/5, median = 5). The least common audiences were visual designers (mean = 3.65/5, median = 4) and developers (mean = 3.46/5, median = 3) (see Figure 4).
Ranking of Importance of Audiences.
Purpose/Role of UX Storytelling
Recall, we began the survey with an open-ended question: “In the context of UX, what does storytelling mean to you?” We focused our analysis on common purposes: share data, engage, align, persuade, and empathize. By far the most common reason our survey respondents cited in their answer of what storytelling means in the context of UX was to empathize with end users, and the least common was in sharing data (see Figure 5).
Purposes of UX Storytelling.
We ordered this section starting with the most commonly coded purpose from the survey that respondents included in their answers. We also include examples of each purpose from the interviews.
Empathize
We coded “Empathize,” the most common code, when participants discussed how stories promoted the sharing of the experiences of users with others to build empathy. Empathy included mentions of needs, wants, pain points, problems, and a focus on creating emotional connections.
We scored 36 (58%) of 62 participants for including empathize in their responses. For example, P12 submitted ‘UX storytelling describes the user journey, from initial pain point through the solution we provide.’ In an answer that was also coded for Align, P36 wrote, ‘Storytelling to me is being able to convey the user's point of view, desires, and needs to an audience that potentially has no connection to the end user.’
During the interview, when we asked P4 to expand on their survey response, they focused on empathize, telling us: And for me, it's about making sure that I'm delving into the mindset of the intended user and making sure that the assumptions that might have previously made by myself or others on the team are validated and being able and open to challenging those assumptions. Making sure that everything is accurate and that we're giving the best data that we can on our users.
Align
Using storytelling to “Align” and create a shared understanding was the next most coded purpose in the survey. To code for “Align,” participants needed to discuss getting people on the same page and creating a shared understanding. Oftentimes, the purpose was to connect people in different disciplines (developers, designers, and product owners). It is important to note that this code is not directly focused on purpose/outcomes and is not about presenting data. We looked for key phrases and words for this code that included “painting a vision,” “shared vision,” “knowing the journey,” “cohesive journey,” and “common understanding.”
We coded 32 (52%) responses for “Align.” In an example that was also coded for Empathize, P9 wrote, “Condensing the issues, solutions, and processes of UX a project into a narrative that is digestible and understandable to stakeholders and outsiders.”
When asked to expand their survey response, P8 included alignment in their interview: There are so many different flavors and understandings of what UX is and isn’t, and misunderstandings, that for me, I use [storytelling] as a tool for us to get on the same page…People have misunderstandings about [UX] on a visual level and nomenclature level, so I like to go in, and first things first, let's just get on the same page. Let's have an understanding about what it is, and what it isn’t, and let's sort of define that and get those boundaries situated, just to have a framework of understanding, so that we can progress forward, from a business perspective.
Engage
The “Engage” code was about creating a compelling and engaging experience for the audience/stakeholders. This included paying attention to the audience and how delivering or communicating the story is tailored or designed to meet the audience's needs. This could include tools or techniques related to the delivery of the information (presentations, visuals, etc.). Keywords included “compelling,” “engaging,” “memorable,” “narrative,” and “resonates.”
A little less than half (n = 25–40%) of responses were coded for “Engage.” An example is the response submitted by p61 was also coded for “Sharing data”: “Bringing stakeholders along on a journey that communicates the findings from research that is easy to follow and memorable.”
When we asked P36 what makes a “good” story in her interview, she focused on engagement: I think what makes a good story is first having something to draw the attention of the audience in, and then having a connection to the audience. So, how can you tell the story and have it relate to your stakeholders if they're at the executive level, designer level, whatever it is…I think a big thing, too, is that at the very end, they remember. So, sometimes when I have a presentation where I tell a story versus just, you know, blah blah blah, here are the facts, people come back, or I hear in meetings, and they will tell a part of the story that I told. So that's kind of how I know when a story has really resonated with someone.
Persuade
We identified the “Persuade” code when the survey respondent focused on how storytelling could result in a particular outcome, influence decision-making, get buy-in, and convince stakeholders to take action. In other words, the participants’ responses implied an actionable solution as a result of their storytelling. We looked for key phrases that included “having an impact,” “taking action,” “making a decision,” and “focus on a solution.”
“Persuade” was coded for 19 (31%) of the respondents. For example, submitted by P7 that was also coded for Empathize wrote: “Forming a narrative that presents the user as an empathetic protagonist who encounters conflict (pain points) that product teams can uniquely solve with UX insights.”In our interview with P33, she expanded her survey response by highlighting the importance of persuasion: As part of telling the story, even if you are potentially skewing business goals to fit the narrative that you're trying to get across…I think it's super important, especially as you progress in your career and are going up the ladder of folks that you're telling the story to… to make sure that you're tying into things that they care about, the sort of like dollars and cents of it all when it all comes down to it. And not necessarily just focusing on the “why” of like, this is going to have a positive impact for users in terms of usability, but then, also in terms of how we're going to succeed as a business.
Share Data
To code for “Share Data,” the survey response must have included data. We looked for keywords that included “data,” “research,” “insights,” “findings,” “evidence,” “results,” and other details that described user research.
We coded “Share Data” for 18 (29%) responses. Examples of sharing data included this submission by P2: “Storytelling is the ability to combine multiple disparate data points, observations, and opportunities into a cohesive vision with clear, logical cause and effect.”
When asked to expand their survey response in their interview, P22 focused on sharing data: I think of the stories that I’m telling as being more like thesis-driven, or claim-driven…So, I make a claim, and that claim is an insight that I’ve gathered from the research that I’ve done, and then I support that claim…I will bring in representative samples, both as sort of quotes that I’ve culled from all the data that I have, but then I always bring in a video or an audio clip of the person actually saying the representative thing…The stories that we’re interpreting, of all our users that we’ve gathered, you know, we need to be using those stories to help us tell our story.
Multifaceted Purposes
Most respondents’ answers included at least one of the purposes, with a mean of 2.1 (see Figure 6) for the distribution of coded responses. Out of 62 respondents, 30 (48%) were coded for two purposes.
Distribution of Coded Responses.
The number of purpose definitions coded differed slightly based on role. Specifically, the number of purposes was a little higher for those who identified their focus as Research (mean = 2.4) than for those who were Designers or a mix of Design and Research (mean = 1.7).
Next, to understand the overlap of the purposes, we looked to see how often the definitions co-occur in participants’ responses (see Figure 7) a co-occurrence chart.
Co-occurrence of Purposes of Storytelling.
We found that there was no clear pattern in how the purposes overlapped. The fact that they do not co-occur suggests they are unique constructs, and each purpose definition helps express a different dimension of UX storytelling to the participants in our study. This finding further supports the claim that storytelling is an elastic concept in practice.
Storytelling in Practice: Three Vignettes
In the following section, we share three vignettes of stories from the semi-structured interviews. During the interviews, we asked participants to tell us a story when storytelling went well and another when it did not. We chose these vignettes to provide more details to demonstrate how storytelling works in practice and how the different dimensions of storytelling show up in each one. This concretizes the definitions of storytelling by placing them in the context of real-world UX practice. We start with two positive stories and then close with one where storytelling was less successful. The names for these participants are pseudonyms.
“We wrapped the important numbers in a story.”
At the time of our interview, Morgan (P42) was a full-time UX manager working at a design agency, where she led a small team of UX researchers and designers. She is White/Caucasian, in her late 40s, living in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States. She had been in her current role for less than a year but had worked in the UX field for nearly 20 years. She earned an undergraduate arts degree and received UX training primarily on the job. In her survey responses, Morgan said that storytelling skills were very important for UX practitioners (5 out of 5), that she used her storytelling skills every day (5 out of 5), and that her storytelling skills were excellent (5 out of 5). She defined storytelling in UX as “relaying info to others [share data] in engaging and memorable ways [engage].”
When asked to tell a story about a time when storytelling positively impacted her work, Morgan relayed an anecdote about a consulting project she was working on in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. Her client, a utility company, had several small business clients who were facing financial difficulties and were unsure of what to do. Morgan's main objective was to help the company learn what their clients were experiencing so the company could figure out how they could help. As a result, Morgan worked with a group of eight customer service representatives and helped them create a methodology for collecting stories from their customers during regular service calls. She also hosted twice-weekly meetings with the group to discuss what they were hearing and identify the most powerful and meaningful stories to share with executives. Each week, Morgan created a short video (1–2 min) that started with a voiceover introducing the major themes or dilemmas customers were experiencing that week, a series of audio clips from service calls demonstrating each theme, a summary of relevant data, and a call to action for company executives to consider. By the end of this project, Morgan noted several positive outcomes for the company. First, company executives developed a greater appreciation for UX research and its ability to provide insights into customers’ experiences. Second, the company implemented new policies and piloted new programs to help the affected business owners, all inspired by Morgan's storytelling videos. As Morgan explained: We knew that for them to get it, they needed to connect to it in multiple ways. They needed to hear it, and they needed to hear it in the voices of those business owners, and they needed to see it. So a video allowed us to pair meaningful images with audio, and, of course, the fact that it was succinct, that it had a point…ultimately, we knew that storytelling was going to make that impact, that if we brought back a bunch of data, and a bunch of like, you know, just random stuff to them that was overwhelming, that [wouldn’t] move them…[Executives] need to see it, and feel it, and hear it, in as little info as you can give them. And sure, we had numbers in there, but it was part of our storytelling. We wrapped the important numbers into the story.
This example showcases all five elements of our UX storytelling heuristic:
Using storytelling to share data from actual users (i.e., video clips and “important numbers”). The importance of engaging the audience (i.e., keeping the videos short and arranging them around a specific theme). How storytelling can align stakeholders around a shared understanding (i.e., getting everyone on the same page about what the stories mean). How stories can help persuade executives to take specific action(s) (i.e., offering a particular call to action based on the stories). How stories can build empathy for the company's users (i.e., helping stakeholders understand the customers’ perspective by using the customers’ actual voices).
“…All of a sudden people went: ‘Oh, shit’.”
Jack (P22) was working as a senior UX researcher, fully remote, as part of an in-house team for a financial services company located in the midwestern portion of the US. Jack is White/Caucasian and in his mid-50s. While Jack had only been working as a practitioner for about 2 years, he had a PhD and over 15 years of experience as a university professor in an area related to UX. In the pre-screen survey responses, Jack marked that storytelling skills were very important for UX practitioners (5 out of 5), that he used his storytelling skills every day (5 out of 5), and that his storytelling skills were excellent (5 out of 5). We identified all five purposes noted in [square brackets] in Jack's definition of storytelling in the context of UX in the pre-screen survey: I use ‘story’telling (I use quotes because the story leans toward non-fiction, due to it being data-driven [share data]) to communicate user needs, pain points, UI interactions, processes, emotions [empathy], etc. to various stakeholders–all in the spirit of creating a narrative [engage] that will convince decision-makers (POs, PMs, Dev, Design, Architecture, Data, etc.) to enhance or develop solutions [persuade] that improve the end-user experience. I also use storytelling in non-research-related meetings to insert UX into processes, conversations, and decisions [align] by advocating for the end user and propagating best UX practices. So, they are demo-ing features of [the new tool] …but they don’t let [potential users] touch it, and it's very controlled. They say things like, ‘This is wonderful, isn’t it?’ These people are out there getting this feedback, and they don’t understand things like confirmation bias. So, they’re coming back and reporting, like grabbing little quotes from people, from these conferences, saying, ‘This is awesome! I’m so excited to see it. This will improve the efficiency.
To explore the veracity of the positive feedback and his hunch that it was not accurately reflecting users’ experience with the product, Jack's research team conducted several studies in which they asked people to complete scenario-based tasks using the tool. The studies involved 30 users and resulted in about 90 hours of videos. To communicate their data, the research team characterized the findings using an affinity map: I showed them the affinity map, and I quantified the number of negative, neutral, and positive comments for them. It was like 78% negative! And the affinity map, as a mural board, and I mean, it's gigantic, because 90 hours! - and it was like this overwhelming visual, coupled with the quantitative data, where all of a sudden people went, ‘Oh, shit.’ And suddenly…leadership [paid] attention, and suddenly, UX started to get invited to more things. Suddenly, we got a UX strategist on our team. Suddenly, we developed a working agreement for UX to work within product, to work within design, to work within development.
Jack summarized his positive story by focusing on how their research upended expectations: We triangulated our data, and we triangulated our methods, in a way to really tell that robust story, with the major thesis that was, ‘you guys are wrong’ … I think it defied expectations, and I think because it really told the stories of what the field, what our users were feeling, and seeing, and experiencing.”
Jack's example illustrates all five elements of our UX storytelling heuristic:
Using storytelling to share data gathered from users (i.e., scenario-based usability studies). Storytelling to align stakeholders (i.e., getting people to acknowledge problems with the new interface designs). The importance of engaging the audience (i.e., using an affinity map to create an overwhelming visual of the data). How stories can persuade executives to take specific action(s) (i.e., his findings led to management hiring a UX strategist and re-think their assumptions). How stories can help other people empathize with end users (i.e., convey users feelings and experiences).
“We didn’t like your presentation.”
During our interview, Ada (P37) told us a story about a time when storytelling wasn’t successful. At the time, she had over 20 years of experience in UX and was working in a Director role where she managed a team of designers and researchers. She is Asian American, in her late 40s, living in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States. She earned a bachelor's and master's degrees and learned about UX during her education. She said that storytelling skills were very important for UX practitioners (5 out of 5), that she used her storytelling skills every day (5 out of 5), and that her storytelling skills were good (3 out of 5). She defined storytelling in UX as “…great for convincing stakeholders [persuade] to the value of UXR and also for convincing [persuade] to take findings.”
While she had a long history in the field, the story she shared with us was related to a time when she had just joined a new organization. She was asked to give a presentation to executives, or as she described them, “the next level up,” about her team and what they did. She had prepared a presentation detailing what her team did as UX researchers and the types of activities they engaged in as part of their work. She reflected on how she had prepared it with some assumptions about what the audience would already understand about UX work. However, she later got the message that the presentation had missed its mark and that the team thought she might be trying to change existing processes at the organization when she intended to explain the work her team currently did. She reflected on this feedback and also considered that she may have been talking too fast and made assumptions about what the audience did and did not know about UX. She realized that she had given them more information than they could process in that format. So, she went back and made changes to the presentation and the delivery. The group met again, and this time, she made several changes to account for the different disciplines in attendance. She slowed it down, explained key concepts, and made it more of a two-way conversation rather than a presentation. She reflected on what she learned for future presentations and thought more carefully about the audience in the future, especially when different disciplines are in the same meeting. I think the presentation probably would have been fine with just the UX folks in the room because they understood what the concepts were, but because the other disciplines were there, they didn't understand the key topics as much [lack of alignment]. I think that they felt almost like we were forcing concepts and processes onto them when really, we were just, ‘hey, this is what we're doing,’ type of thing. I think, knowing that there's different disciplines in the room, I needed to be more aware of that. Changing the tone, or even the speed in which [I talk]. I usually talk fast in my meetings, and this is too much information; they can’t process it. If these concepts are new to these other disciplines, it's almost like you have to slow down and walk them through even basic concepts so they can get that before they can jump into the next slides or go deeper into what we're doing [lack of engagement]. So, some of the things I learned from that presentation.
Based on the five elements of our UX storytelling heuristic, there are two key pieces that are missing from her original story that she goes on to rectify in the second version.
First, although the first presentation was full of important and relevant information, there was a mismatch with the audience's expectations. To make it more engaging, she slowed down her pace and also shifted from a more formal presentation to a conversation. We can also see evidence of how the first story did not attend to aligning the stakeholders. It was clear in the second example how important it was to think about the needs of the different groups of people in the room.
Discussion
In this section, we discuss the findings by sharing implications for both UX practice and education. The goal of this work was to address the following questions:
How do UX practitioners describe the role of storytelling in their work? How do UX practitioners perceive and describe their storytelling skills? How can a deeper understanding of storytelling inform our teaching and help prepare students for their future UX careers?
The data demonstrate the importance of storytelling for practitioners, how storytelling is contextual, and how even experienced professionals see the need to continuously improve and hone their storytelling skills. Given our collective interest in preparing students for industry careers, we believe this data helps educators who wish to emphasize the importance of storytelling in their courses and programs, even though it is not typically included in UX or HCI curricula.
Storytelling is Multifaceted and Strategic
The data from this study shows that storytelling in UX is multifaceted and is made up of five connected purposes: share data, engage, align, persuade, and empathize. This supports previous work claiming that storytelling is elastic (MacDonald et al., 2024) and fuzzy (Grimaldi et al., 2013) in that it is not easily reduced to a simple strategy and can flex to encompass one or all of these purposes depending on context. A majority of respondents (74%) mentioned at least two different storytelling purposes, and most only included 2–3 purposes in their definitions.
This expands storytelling for some who defined it narrowly (e.g., getting buy-in) and contracts it for those who defined it broadly (e.g., as “everything”). Acknowledging five distinct purposes can help clarify complexity around storytelling by embracing its flexibility while simultaneously showing that UX storytelling is not always one thing, and its use is contingent on context. Further, storytelling is strategic and connected to achieving particular outcomes. Being intentional about which particular purpose(s) of storytelling to focus on can help bring about those desired outcomes. The data from the survey and the examples from the vignettes shows how multifaceted storytelling can be and while all purposes might be present, they differ depending on context and audience. Professionals lean into different aspects of storytelling at different times depending on their communication purposes and goals.
For educators, clarifying the five distinct purposes of storytelling can be helpful when introducing the concept to students. Framing assignments or activities to more explicitly focus on one or more of the purposes of UX storytelling can help students begin to practice their skills more strategically. When first learning about storytelling, this heuristic can help ground students and keep them from getting overwhelmed by its elasticity. Students can be primed to see how each of the roles of storytelling may be applied differently depending on the context and challenged to incorporate different aspects of storytelling when presenting UX work.
The Burden and Opportunity of Alignment
As previously mentioned, UX is a discipline in technology-based companies that is the youngest and often outnumbered by others in software development or management (Kaplan, 2020; Sauro, 2017). Therefore, the onus falls on UX practitioners to explain their processes, value, and expertise to others, both in general and related to the many specific design decisions that are made every day on teams. Therefore, the purpose of alignment is crucial. Take the example from Ada's story, a practitioner with over 20 years of experience in design, but she shared her example of a story that was not successful, about how she had to explain what it was that her team did in a way that was understandable to a new team.
For educators, it is critical to emphasize to UX students that part of their job will be to explain their methods, approaches, and contributions to others, even at times, having to teach others in their organization about what they do. Students should recognize that there are different disciplines with different languages/perspectives, and aligning across those boundaries is an essential part of their work and simultaneously can be a challenge. When possible, students should be given opportunities to collaborate with others outside of their discipline on projects, including client or community-based projects and software developers, to provide them with experience in communicating UX to others outside of the practice.
The Central Role of Empathy
The topic of empathy is familiar in design and UX and central for designing for users’ and their needs (Battarbee & Koskinen, 2005; Devecchi & Guerrini, 2017; Heylighen & Dong, 2019; Wright & McCarthy, 2008; Young, 2015). The concept of empathy was not identified in the definition of storytelling found in the key practitioner texts on storytelling that informed our codebook (Dahlström, 2019; Quesenbery & Brooks, 2010). However, it was prevalent in the data, being the most common purpose, identified in 58% of the responses.
Designing for UX begins with creating a rich, empathic understanding of the users’ desired experiences and only then designing concepts and products to support them. While not all stories are about building empathy for users, many UX stories do—and should—have this explicit component. This can help practitioners more precisely focus the stories they tell, how they tell them, and who they tell them to. Starting with users and their stories is (almost) always a good strategy. In addition, as Greever recommends in his book, practitioners would benefit from expanding their skills related to empathy to focus on their stakeholders and their viewpoints (2015).
For educators, expanding the concept of empathy for students is key. While many educators teach methods and techniques for helping designers develop empathy for users, they should expand this to focus on helping relay empathy by using storytelling. Empathy in UX works on several levels: learning about the experience of users to inform design, and translating those experiences to others within the organization. This, in turn, can help students be more self-reflective and aware of how they gain empathy and explore how to prompt or inspire similar moments in others. This process, in turn, requires students to empathize with the many audiences they communicate with. It could be a jumping-off point for a deeper discussion or exploration of empathy as a multidimensional concept.
Data Alone Is Not Enough
While the field of UX emphasizes the importance of being data-driven to inform decision-making, our findings show that data alone is not always enough to advocate for a particular design decision. While we identified sharing data as the least common (29%) purpose, it's clear that data has an important role to play. However, as Friess argued in her ethnography study on working design teams, solely focusing on empirical data to make design decisions reduces the agency of the designer and ultimately the success of the design (Friess, 2010). She instead argues for designers to have more rhetorical agency, which elevates their design expertise over solely using empirical data. We see the data from this study, namely the stories of stories we collected from designers, that show that solely relying on empirical evidence is not enough, and instead practitioners need to marshal a variety of rhetorical strategies to advocate for users and design decisions. While many UXers already understand this intuitively, it is worth emphasizing that data need to be wrapped in a story to have an impact. It is rare that the purpose is to merely share data with stakeholders. Rather, its purpose is typically connected to align, persuade, and get buy-in. Therefore, how data is communicated and shared is rarely as simple as just showing it to people.
For educators, helping students see that data is one ingredient in a larger story can help them explore ways to present and engage audiences in the sharing of data. Educators should acknowledge that analyzing data, which itself is hard to teach, is just one part of the equation. They also need to help students learn how to wrap that data in compelling and engaging stories that have a specific purpose in mind. This is hard to simulate without authentic design problems and authentic stakeholders, so looking for projects and activities that involve different stakeholders is key.
Engaging Audiences for Storytelling Success
While each purpose of storytelling is a unique constructs, the code of Engage was most likely to occur with other purposes, leading us to conclude that engaging the audience is crucial, but often is paired with another purpose. Storytelling implies an audience and in order to do the things in UX storytelling—align, persuade, share data, and empathize—the audience must be engaged by the speaker. For design practitioners, a key step in communicating with purpose is to think through the needs and goals of the audience and what messages may engage them. Looking at two of the vignettes presented from the data, Jack's story demonstrates how he chose to present stakeholders with almost an overwhelming amount of data (negative responses, a large affinity map) to combat their falsely held assumptions about the direction of the product. This was an engaging way to change their understanding of an existing belief and was done so with the sense that he needed more data, or different data, but importantly presented in a compelling way that was hard to ignore. Further, Ada's unsuccessful story shows clearly how her misunderstanding of the stakeholder audience needs led to a less than successful presentation and meeting, and it demonstrates her self-reflection as a skilled practitioner to know that she needed to go another route with her meeting. This points to the fact that practitioners need to develop a detailed and deeper understanding of “know your audience” when it comes to stakeholders and develop self-reflection to consider and examine successful and unsuccessful storytelling experiences with stakeholders.
For educators, it would be beneficial to be more explicit when teaching students how to engage with an audience, both in terms of the content and the performance, but also explain how engagement is a means to an end, and that to build empathy for users or persuade stakeholders, they need to be engaged. To do so, we suggest providing students with opportunities to think through the rhetorical choices they might make in presenting data or designs to clients who are supportive vs skeptical, who are data-driven vs. story-driven. While the binaries might simplify the lessons to start, it can communicate to students the ways they engage stakeholders is nuanced and requires thought, planning, and strategy.
Limitations and Future Work
We acknowledge some of the limitations of this work. First, the first round of data collection was a survey and therefore the answers may be limited based on participants’ responses and willingness to elaborate. Further, the wording of the survey question was “What does storytelling mean to you” it was not explicitly about the purpose of storytelling.
In addition, the participants who responded to the survey were skewed toward UX researchers vs. UX designers. Among the 131 pool participants who completed the pre-screen survey and agreed to be contacted for future studies, six (4%) identified their primary focus as “Design,” 56 (43%) focused on “Mix of Design and Research,” 66 (50%) focused on research and three (2%) listed their focus as “Other.” This is also indicative of the fact that most designers in UX do some kind of research in addition to design work. Further, UX researchers may be more likely to respond to requests for research participants. In the future, it would be good to sample a broader mix of researchers, designers, and those with a mix of research and design in their job responsibilities.
In future work, it would be helpful to survey a broader selection of professionals and present the five definitions to evaluate the importance or prevalence of each purpose of storytelling for their practice. In addition, future work should include evaluating pedagogical interventions such as assignments and activities that can heighten students’ awareness of the multifaceted purposes of storytelling, including reflecting on their choices and strategies.
Conclusion
Due to the elastic nature of storytelling in UX, it makes it challenging to teach to students. In this study, we have attempted to bring more clarity to the concept of UX storytelling by articulating five unique but connected purposes of UX storytelling: share data, engage, align, persuade, and empathize that can be used as a heuristic. This clarity can help practitioners and educators alike have a more nuanced understanding of how to communicate about design and design decisions alike to help UX practitioners be more successful in their work.
Footnotes
Acknowledgments
Thanks to our participants who took part in the survey and interviews and shared their stories with us. Thank you to Roman Zapato and Rachel Skilton for their assistance in the research. This work was supported in part by DePaul University and the University of Washington Tacoma.
Ethical Approval
The study design was reviewed and approved by the University of Washington's IRB, Human Subjects Division, reference number: STUDY00007827 and DePaul's IRB, reference number: CP0403317CDM.
Informed Consent
Informed consent was received from all participants who took part in this research.
Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was funded in part by an internal grant from DePaul University.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Data Availability
Due to terms of our IRB review, we cannot share the raw data collected as part of this study.