One of the biggest dilemmas that product teams face is confusing designs that actually work well with designs that look great. It may seem like a basic mistake but it can cause grave consequences: If your product does not work well, no one will care how it looks.
Story-centered design
Focusing on how a product works means crafting stories that show how the customers will interact with a product; only after sharing the story is where the inclusion of visual enhancers become a way to tell that narrative of interaction.
The process of designing through story
In story-centered design, the team critiques work by looking at sequential mockups that serve as frames like a filmstrip. Designers would present the sentences the customers read, every screen that system generates in response. The design follows a customer from an initial trigger all the way to completing a specific goal. These techniques work for a variety of platforms banking websites, food business sites, analytics dashboards and beyond.
Story-centered design is similar to test-driven development. Instead of writing tests to exercise code, teams create stories to exercise designs. Story-centered design can have a great impact on a team’s product quality and execution speed.
How story-centered design works well
Problems are spotted early on
Story-centered design allows teams a system for making design decisions based on how users experience a product. And stories make it easier to notice when prompts don’t set the proper expectations. All these tiny details make up to better usability and customer engagement.
Clarifies design goals
This approach forces creators to come to an agreement on the design goals before proceeding to the details. This is helpful because there will be a concise vision of the set goals on whether the designs accomplish the established team vision.
Efficient data collection
Navigating through the customer experience and through finishing a goal maps well makes story-centered design all the more efficient for collecting business-related data. Stories make it easier to check that you have all the essential elements to encourage user behavior.
Speeds things up
Stories can be reused and enhanced. Mockups created prior can be repurposed into a quick prototype for user studies. The same narrative outline can be used to build a funnel analysis that helps teams find out whether people are making it through the story in the live product.
