Photo by Davis Neable
Last Wednesday, Bob Barlow-Busch and I delivered a presentation as a part of the Communitech Breakfast Series. It was titled Insights that lead to great UX, and the focus was on ways in which to use stories to fuel insights.
We structured the presentation in a way that put the focus on stories, with the bulk of the presentation being organized into 25 Short Stories About User Experience. Perhaps unexpectedly, the structure was inspired by a similarly-titled movie about Glenn Gould, as well as John Cage’s story-telling on Indeterminacy, and Oblique Strategies, an influential card deck by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt. And, of course, there was the obvious appeal of telling stories about stories — everything goes meta.
The beauty of the structure for us is that it’s quite flexible — stories can be swapped in and out as needed to emphasize different things for different presentation contexts. In fact, there were stories that didn’t make it into last week’s presentation.
It was the first time delivering this presentation, and we were pleased that people who attended appear to have found it a valuable one.