How I Employ Storytelling When Designing Complex Products
Based on real life events
OOF! Where to begin?
If you’re reading this, there are extremely high chances that you’ve heard about “storytelling“. It’s a whole niche even for folks on the marketing and content creation side of things, but that’s not the brand of storytelling we’ll be unravelling today. We’ll be talking about storytelling from the angle of telling actual stories.
Now, you might be “durh, I know”, and to that I say give me a chance. Okay?
Our brand of storytelling involves telling a story, almost like the fairy tale kind. The “once upon a time…” kind. How does this relate to product building? Let me cook.
You see as a designer building digital products, there’s a very high chance that you’re the least knowledgeable on the team on the technical front, and so you could very easily be overwhelmed, overlooked, be talked down on because, after all, your job is to make things look beautiful. Leave the technical jargon to the big boys. Well, no.
Your job is to bring the user’s perspective to the technical jargon. There’s a reason why the Joker’s card is really powerful, or the fool’s card from Now You See Me 2, for my movie nerds.
As a designer, you’re malleable. You bring the “confusion“ to the user in your standup meetings because if you leave the founder or developers to it, they’d assume their digital product is so simple, and users are simply idiots.
I moved from designing a finance product to designing a construction ecosystem for African project owners and developers to designing a healthcare framework for a whole ass city in Nigeria. Here are a few ways storytelling helped me.
Whenever I hit a roadblock when designing these products, I backtrack and then tell myself the user story in chronology, the fairy tale kind, not the user story prepared from the marriage of a Lazy Project Manager and ChatGPT (more on that some other time), but here’s an example of what such a story looks like;
A man goes abroad to acquire wealth; he does so successfully, and now he’s looking to build a mansion in his hometown in Nigeria. How do I ensure that the money trail is obvious to him from the other side of the world, while he sees all tasks undertaken within his employ? Showing all records and setbacks, and he can inquire when things look awry. Yup, that’s a digital solution which I designed, see kólé.
Storytelling dumbs down the technicality and reveals intelligent jargon — the need-to-haves, the useless cool features. There’s a caveat for this, though.
You have to be willing to go to war for your prospecting users, and yes, even when you don’t understand half the things being said on the call, you should be willing to look confused because guess what? There’s a very high chance that you’re the only advocate for the user; the rest of your team might be advocating for the solution being built, hoping that users will have to learn a new way to access the solution being built.
There’s more, but let me stop here. These are a few ways I use storytelling as a digital product designer working in teams and with founders. Any of these sound familiar? Do let me know your experiences and what you think.
Till we meet again, have a great one. Remember you’re a STAAR — don’t stop shining.
If we were to leave all creative work to technical individuals everything would be beautifully the same, and I mean this in a euphemistic way. We can already see traces of it with templated websites for every product, the AI generated websites and arts. I use AI for Art currently mainly because I do not have the time and resources to create what I want which is the purpose but it's never exactly what I want. Other than that, I tend not to use it for anything else at all.
If you sit and talk to most technical individuals especially founders from anywhere in the World, they see no reason why the affluent, bourgeoisie had artists commission artworks. They'd tell you that the Medici's wasted money and if they were alive today, they could simply prompt it and have the art in print. These are the same people who do not understand why people buy mechanical watches instead of an Apple watch or why buy a Koenigsegg or Ferrari when you could have a Tesla. Most creative folk don't really make much to begin with. It's better for product designer and some of us in the Tech space but awful for illustrators and artists.
The irony is how they believe creative work can be outsourced by a matrix in some data centre in Delaware but would tell you it can never replace them. If you try to reason with them alluding their reasons to be the same as that of a creative their brain goes kaput.
We are laying a dangerous precedence--one where art and craftsmanship is traded for rapid conversion. I understand we want to start making money now and by now, I mean a minute ago when you started reading this comment. But if we as designers don't make these arguments including the ones you've made on your Instagram page the future of design is bleak.
There are many instances I could give but for now I'll restrict myself to this.
And I nit picking at these point the border of the cards and the edge is something to look at. (T_T)