2. Storytelling
Communicate your vision and make your
audience care about the people for whom you
are designing.
Project Goal:
A concise user-driven narrative that
communicates the team’s insights, shows the
value of the solution, and inspires the audience.
3. Process Essentials:
Distill to a simple shared understanding of
the central vision to communicate.
Edit the team’s story down to what is critical
and resonant to the audience.
Craft a short visual presentation that
engages your audience.
4. Learning Objectives
Practice a user-centered form of
storytelling.
Get comfortable with showing and inspiring
rather than reporting.
Iterate on the ways in which storytelling can
have the greatest impact on your audience.
5. 3 keys for success
Show, don’t tell
Bring the user to life
Create a story arc with character, conflict,
and transformation
11. Storyboard
On a board, as a team, build a story arc that
introduces the character, sets up conflict,
and then shows transformation.
Use sketches and words to make the
storyboard.
Get your team to contribute to this group
artifact.
12. Storyboard
Ask the team:
What is the core character and need of our
user, and what are the details we want to
use to show that?
How does our work transform (part of) our
character’s life?
What is the core idea that our solution is
supposed to communicate?
13. Improvise
Once you have a basic idea of the arc you
are trying to create, the best way to
develop your presentation is to improvise
your way to it.
Move quickly from creating your storyboard
to playing it through.
Actually speak the narration and act the
parts.
14. Gut Check Consider if you have these four
elements that we look for in early-stage design project
pitches
It presents a User that the audience actually cares
about, brought to life
It expresses something you learned that is actually
new and insightful
It expresses the central features of a solution worth
pursuing (that responds to the needs of a user, and
leverages what you have learned)
It gives a vision for where you are headed (inspire the
audience about what will be next)
15. Practice
Do multiple live-action full run-throughs.
Cycle through this process many times, as
though it were any other iterative design
project.
16. Do it.
Set up a whiteboard with free space to
storyboard.
Storyboard the story of your user, one
prototype and one user test.
