This article is an excerpt from the Shortform book guide to "The Design of Everyday Things" by Don Norman. Shortform has the world's best summaries and analyses of books you should be reading.
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What is UX storytelling? How can you use it to create better designs?
UX storytelling is a user experience ideology that recognizes that an object has to tell a cohesive story. The user doesn’t have to fully understand how it works, but they do need a sense of a cohesive story.
Read more about UX storytelling and how it works.
The Role of UX Storytelling
Root cause analysis helps us make sense of other people’s behavior. To understand our own behavior, we turn to stories. Humans are born storytellers. When we’re faced with a jumble of information, our natural instinct is to organize it into a story that explains cause and effect. Stories help us make sense of our world and our place in it.
Reorganizing information into a cohesive story is usually a subconscious process. We operate under the assumption that there must be an underlying pattern connecting different pieces of information in a way that makes sense, regardless of whether such a pattern actually exists. In practice, this means that humans are really good at coming up with stories to explain our experiences, but not so good at determining whether those stories are actually true.
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Like what you just read? Read the rest of the world's best book summary and analysis of Don Norman's "The Design of Everyday Things" at Shortform .
Here's what you'll find in our full The Design of Everyday Things summary :
- How psychology plays a part in the design of objects you encounter daily
- Why pushing a door that was meant to be pulled isn't your fault
- How bad design leads to more human errors
