Why is storytelling important?
“You’re never going to kill storytelling because it’s built-in the human plan. We come with it.”
– Margaret Atwood
It is widely used in every phase of a product life cycle: all the way from design to marketing. But is it really something that we can use in our daily work?
The art of storytelling: How it helps us explain difficult concepts
It is a piece of common knowledge, that we use stories to make our world meaningful. What is more, our brain detects patterns of information in nature’s visual forms, like faces, figures, flowers, as well as it detects in speech. Because of these two things not only are stories meaningful but they are also familiar patterns to us.
In practice, we can take advantage of this nature of storytelling to communicate among team members and to explain our ideas to stakeholders. You can also use it to explain how the product you are building can be useful to the target audience.
Storytelling with data enables us to create a shared understanding
Storytelling has the potential to generate a shared understanding of a situation, a subject, or a problem between people. And because of its engaging nature, it has the potential to attract and maintain attention as well as to allow audiences to make meaningful connections.
What makes a good story?
In general, a good story is about something that is interesting or important to a certain audience. Because of its highly subjective nature, it is hard to define what we can consider interesting. However, there are some universal rules that we can follow.
Let’s check them:
1. Fun: Good stories keep the reader interested and concerned about what’s coming next.
2. Educational: They stimulate interest and contribute to the knowledge base of the reader.
3. Universal: Good stories can be told to different audiences and tap into the experiences and emotions of many people.
4. Organized: Concise organization is followed by good stories and the organization contributes to the communication and absorption of the core message. Memorable. Great stories are written in the reader’s mind, either by inspiration, scandal or humor.
Visual storytelling to understand your users
A great story catches attention, offers insight, and inspires actions for teams and stakeholders. There are many ways to communicate stories visually, for example with journey maps or empathy maps, but the most prominent technique is storyboarding. Storyboarding originally comes from motion picture production. Walt Disney Studios is credited with making storyboards famous, using frame sketches before actual production.
