Ever since I was a boy, Iâve been fascinated with movies. I loved the characters and the excitementâbut most of all the stories. I wanted to be an actor. And I believed that Iâd get to do the things that Indiana Jones did and go on exciting adventures. I even dreamed up ideas for movies that my friends and I could make and star in. But they never went any further. I did, however, end up working in user experience (UX). Now, I realize that thereâs an element of theater to UXâI hadnât really considered it before, but user research is storytelling. And to get the most out of user research, you need to tell a good story where you bring stakeholdersâthe product team and decision makersâalong and get them interested in learning more.
Think of your favorite movie. More than likely it follows a three-act structure thatâs commonly seen in storytelling: the setup, the conflict, and the resolution. The first act shows what exists today, and it helps you get to know the characters and the challenges and problems that they face. Act two introduces the conflict, where the action is. Here, problems grow or get worse. And the third and final act is the resolution. This is where the issues are resolved and the characters learn and change. I believe that this structure is also a great way to think about user research, and I think that it can be especially helpful in explaining user research to others.
Use storytelling as a structure to do research
Itâs sad to say, but many have come to see research as being expendable. If budgets or timelines are tight, research tends to be one of the first things to go. Instead of investing in research, some product managers rely on designers orâworseâtheir own opinion to make the ârightâ choices for users based on their experience or accepted best practices. That may get teams some of the way, but that approach can so easily miss out on solving usersâ real problems. To remain user-centered, this is something we should avoid. User research elevates design. It keeps it on track, pointing to problems and opportunities. Being aware of the issues with your product and reacting to them can help you stay ahead of your competitors.
In the three-act structure, each act corresponds to a part of the process, and each part is critical to telling the whole story. Letâs look at the different acts and how they align with user research.
Act one: setup
The setup is all about understanding the background, and thatâs where foundational research comes in. Foundational research (also called generative, discovery, or initial research) helps you understand users and identify their problems. Youâre learning about what exists today, the challenges users have, and how the challenges affect themâjust like in the movies. To do foundational research, you can conduct contextual inquiries or diary studies (or both!), which can help you start to identify problems as well as opportunities. It doesnât need to be a huge investment in time or money.
Erika Hall writes about minimum viable ethnography, which can be as simple as spending 15 minutes with a user and asking them one thing: ââWalk me through your day yesterday.â Thatâs it. Present that one request. Shut up and listen to them for 15 minutes. Do your damndest to keep yourself and your interests out of it. Bam, youâre doing ethnography.â According to Hall, â[This] will probably prove quite illuminating. In the highly unlikely case that you didnât learn anything new or useful, carry on with enhanced confidence in your direction.â
This makes total sense to me. And I love that this makes user research so accessible. You donât need to prepare a lot of documentation; you can just recruit participants and do it! This can yield a wealth of information about your users, and itâll help you better understand them and whatâs going on in their lives. Thatâs really what act one is all about: understanding where users are coming from.
Jared Spool talks about the importance of foundational research and how it should form the bulk of your research. If you can draw from any additional user data that you can get your hands on, such as surveys or analytics, that can supplement what youâve heard in the foundational studies or even point to areas that need further investigation. Together, all this data paints a clearer picture of the state of things and all its shortcomings. And thatâs the beginning of a compelling story. Itâs the point in the plot where you realize that the main charactersâor the users in this caseâare facing challenges that they need to overcome. Like in the movies, this is where you start to build empathy for the characters and root for them to succeed. And hopefully stakeholders are now doing the same. Their sympathy may be with their business, which could be losing money because users canât complete certain tasks. Or maybe they do empathize with usersâ struggles. Either way, act one is your initial hook to get the stakeholders interested and invested.
Once stakeholders begin to understand the value of foundational research, that can open doors to more opportunities that involve users in the decision-making process. And that can guide product teams toward being more user-centered. This benefits everyoneâusers, the product, and stakeholders. Itâs like winning an Oscar in movie termsâit often leads to your product being well received and successful. And this can be an incentive for stakeholders to repeat this process with other products. Storytelling is the key to this process, and knowing how to tell a good story is the only way to get stakeholders to really care about doing more research.
This brings us to act two, where you iteratively evaluate a design or concept to see whether it addresses the issues.
Act two: conflict
Act two is all about digging deeper into the problems that you identified in act one. This usually involves directional research, such as usability tests, where you assess a potential solution (such as a design) to see whether it addresses the issues that you found. The issues could include unmet needs or problems with a flow or process thatâs tripping users up. Like act two in a movie, more issues will crop up along the way. Itâs here that you learn more about the characters as they grow and develop through this act.
Usability tests should typically include around five participants according to Jakob Nielsen, who found that that number of users can usually identify most of the problems: âAs you add more and more users, you learn less and less because you will keep seeing the same things again and again⊠After the fifth user, you are wasting your time by observing the same findings repeatedly but not learning much new.â
There are parallels with storytelling here too; if you try to tell a story with too many characters, the plot may get lost. Having fewer participants means that each userâs struggles will be more memorable and easier to relay to other stakeholders when talking about the research. This can help convey the issues that need to be addressed while also highlighting the value of doing the research in the first place.
Researchers have run usability tests in person for decades, but you can also conduct usability tests remotely using tools like Microsoft Teams, Zoom, or other teleconferencing software. This approach has become increasingly popular since the beginning of the pandemic, and it works well. You can think of in-person usability tests like going to a play and remote sessions as more like watching a movie. There are advantages and disadvantages to each. In-person usability research is a much richer experience. Stakeholders can experience the sessions with other stakeholders. You also get real-time reactionsâincluding surprise, agreement, disagreement, and discussions about what theyâre seeing. Much like going to a play, where audiences get to take in the stage, the costumes, the lighting, and the actorsâ interactions, in-person research lets you see users up close, including their body language, how they interact with the moderator, and how the scene is set up.
If in-person usability testing is like watching a playâstaged and controlledâthen conducting usability testing in the field is like immersive theater where any two sessions might be very different from one another. You can take usability testing into the field by creating a replica of the space where users interact with the product and then conduct your research there. Or you can go out to meet users at their location to do your research. With either option, you get to see how things work in context, things come up that wouldnât have in a lab environmentâand conversion can shift in entirely different directions. As researchers, you have less control over how these sessions go, but this can sometimes help you understand users even better. Meeting users where they are can provide clues to the external forces that could be affecting how they use your product. In-person usability tests provide another level of detail thatâs often missing from remote usability tests.
Thatâs not to say that the âmoviesââremote sessionsâarenât a good option. Remote sessions can reach a wider audience. They allow a lot more stakeholders to be involved in the research and to see whatâs going on. And they open the doors to a much wider geographical pool of users. But with any remote session there is the potential of time wasted if participants canât log in or get their microphone working.
The benefit of usability testing, whether remote or in person, is that you get to see real users interact with the designs in real time, and you can ask them questions to understand their thought processes and grasp of the solution. This can help you not only identify problems but also glean why theyâre problems in the first place. Furthermore, you can test hypotheses and gauge whether your thinking is correct. By the end of the sessions, youâll have a much clearer picture of how usable the designs are and whether they work for their intended purposes. Act two is the heart of the storyâwhere the excitement isâbut there can be surprises too. This is equally true of usability tests. Often, participants will say unexpected things, which change the way that you look at thingsâand these twists in the story can move things in new directions.
Unfortunately, user research is sometimes seen as expendable. And too often usability testing is the only research process that some stakeholders think that they ever need. In fact, if the designs that youâre evaluating in the usability test arenât grounded in a solid understanding of your users (foundational research), thereâs not much to be gained by doing usability testing in the first place. Thatâs because youâre narrowing the focus of what youâre getting feedback on, without understanding the users' needs. As a result, thereâs no way of knowing whether the designs might solve a problem that users have. Itâs only feedback on a particular design in the context of a usability test.
On the other hand, if you only do foundational research, while you might have set out to solve the right problem, you wonât know whether the thing that youâre building will actually solve that. This illustrates the importance of doing both foundational and directional research.
In act two, stakeholders willâhopefullyâget to watch the story unfold in the user sessions, which creates the conflict and tension in the current design by surfacing their highs and lows. And in turn, this can help motivate stakeholders to address the issues that come up.
Act three: resolution
While the first two acts are about understanding the background and the tensions that can propel stakeholders into action, the third part is about resolving the problems from the first two acts. While itâs important to have an audience for the first two acts, itâs crucial that they stick around for the final act. That means the whole product team, including developers, UX practitioners, business analysts, delivery managers, product managers, and any other stakeholders that have a say in the next steps. It allows the whole team to hear usersâ feedback together, ask questions, and discuss whatâs possible within the projectâs constraints. And it lets the UX research and design teams clarify, suggest alternatives, or give more context behind their decisions. So you can get everyone on the same page and get agreement on the way forward.
This act is mostly told in voiceover with some audience participation. The researcher is the narrator, who paints a picture of the issues and what the future of the product could look like given the things that the team has learned. They give the stakeholders their recommendations and their guidance on creating this vision.
Nancy Duarte in the Harvard Business Review offers an approach to structuring presentations that follow a persuasive story. âThe most effective presenters use the same techniques as great storytellers: By reminding people of the status quo and then revealing the path to a better way, they set up a conflict that needs to be resolved,â writes Duarte. âThat tension helps them persuade the audience to adopt a new mindset or behave differently.â
This type of structure aligns well with research results, and particularly results from usability tests. It provides evidence for âwhat isââthe problems that youâve identified. And âwhat could beââyour recommendations on how to address them. And so on and so forth.
You can reinforce your recommendations with examples of things that competitors are doing that could address these issues or with examples where competitors are gaining an edge. Or they can be visual, like quick mockups of how a new design could look that solves a problem. These can help generate conversation and momentum. And this continues until the end of the session when youâve wrapped everything up in the conclusion by summarizing the main issues and suggesting a way forward. This is the part where you reiterate the main themes or problems and what they mean for the productâthe denouement of the story. This stage gives stakeholders the next steps and hopefully the momentum to take those steps!
While we are nearly at the end of this story, letâs reflect on the idea that user research is storytelling. All the elements of a good story are there in the three-act structure of user research:
- Act one: You meet the protagonists (the users) and the antagonists (the problems affecting users). This is the beginning of the plot. In act one, researchers might use methods including contextual inquiry, ethnography, diary studies, surveys, and analytics. The output of these methods can include personas, empathy maps, user journeys, and analytics dashboards.
- Act two: Next, thereâs character development. Thereâs conflict and tension as the protagonists encounter problems and challenges, which they must overcome. In act two, researchers might use methods including usability testing, competitive benchmarking, and heuristics evaluation. The output of these can include usability findings reports, UX strategy documents, usability guidelines, and best practices.
- Act three: The protagonists triumph and you see what a better future looks like. In act three, researchers may use methods including presentation decks, storytelling, and digital media. The output of these can be: presentation decks, video clips, audio clips, and pictures.Â
The researcher has multiple roles: theyâre the storyteller, the director, and the producer. The participants have a small role, but they are significant characters (in the research). And the stakeholders are the audience. But the most important thing is to get the story right and to use storytelling to tell usersâ stories through research. By the end, the stakeholders should walk away with a purpose and an eagerness to resolve the productâs ills.
So the next time that youâre planning research with clients or youâre speaking to stakeholders about research that youâve done, think about how you can weave in some storytelling. Ultimately, user research is a win-win for everyone, and you just need to get stakeholders interested in how the story ends.