Q&A with a Story Guru: Whitney Quesenbery: Stories Move Us into the Future
User Experience (UX) Design is one of those exotic (to me) areas that I know almost nothing about. Yet, it makes sense that “user experience” would suggest storytelling. Whitney Quesenbery is a practitioner who uses storytelling in User Experience Design. I’m excited about her upcoming book, She is currently working on a book on Storytelling in User Experience Design. I’m so tickled to bring you her thoughts on yet another fascinating application of storytelling. This Q&A will appear over the next five days.
Bio: (From the Web site Whitney Interactive Design) Whitney Quesenbery is a user researcher, user experience practitioner, and usability expert with a passion for clear communication. She has been in the field since 1989, helping companies from The Open University to Sage Software to the National Cancer Institute develop usable web sites and applications.
She is the director of the UPA Usability in Civic Lifeproject and has been appointed to the US Elections
Assistance Commission’s guidelines development committee, where she works
to ensure the usability of voting systems. She represented UPA on an Advisory Committee for the Access Board (TEITAC), working to update US accessibility regulations.
She has served as the president of UPA (Usability
Professionals’ Association), Manager of
the STC Usability and User Experience (UUX), and
a member of the Executive Committee for UXNet, as well as an active participant
in local usability groups. In 2005 she was given the STC President’s Award for her work on communities in membership organizations, and in 2007, she was honored with a UPA President’s Award and as a Fellow of the STC.
Her most recent publication is a chapter on “Storytelling and Narrative” in The Persona Lifecycle, by Pruitt and Adlin. She’s also proud that one of her articles won an award as a Society for Technical Communication (STC) Outstanding Journal Article, and that her chapter “Dimensions of Usability” in Content and Complexity turns up on so many course reading lists. She is currently working on a book on Storytelling in User Experience Design for Rosenfeld Media
As a principal at Cognetics Corporation for 12 years, she was instrumental
in building a great design staff, and the design leader for many design
and usability projects. Her project credits there include work with companies such as Novartis, Deloitte Consulting, Lucent,
McGraw-Hill, Siemens, Hewlett-Packard, and Dow Jones. While at Cognetics,
she was one of the developers of LUCID (Logical User-Centered Interaction
Design), which promotes the importance of a user-centered approach and usability
in design.
Her projects have won many awards in industry
competitions, but the two she is proudest of are the 1996 Best of Show
in the STC International Online Competition for a multimedia
CD-ROM on the benefits of non-traditional documentation for AT&T/Lucent
and the 2001 Frank R. Smith Outstanding Journal Article for "On Beyond
Help — User Assistance and the User Interface" in STC’s Technical
Communication journal.
Q&A with Whitney Quesenbery, Question 1:
Q: You note in your blog that “the real value of stories in user experience design is that they can move us into the future.” Can you elaborate a bit on how stories do that and perhaps given an example of how you have used story in user experience design to move people into the future?
A: I meant something very simple. Although user experience stories are built on insights from research, their purpose is to help create something new. Often, they explore how a new or updated product can change an unsatisfactory experience into a good one. They describe a possible future condition, and in doing so help it become a reality.
This is not all user experience stories, of course. Sometimes, we use stories to present a current or past situation. But the reason we spend time thinking about current experience is to be able to create new experiences — and move us into the future.
