See a photo of Whitney, her bio, Part 1 of this Q&A, Part 2, and Part 3.

Q&A with Whitney Quesenbery, Question 4:

Q: How did you initially become involved with story/storytelling narrative? What attracted you to this field? What do you love about it?

A: User experience is my second career. My first was in theatre, where I worked for many years as a lighting designer. When I started working on an early hypertext project, the connection between theatre and UX seemed very obvious. I used to talk about the computer screen as a very small stage proscenium.

We always had activities in UX that were “story-like:” creating scenarios to describe how a site is used, describing what we learned in user research, and creating the stories for usability testing tasks. But, none of this was formally connected to “storytelling” in my mind. That came when I first heard Stephen Denning speak, and read The Springboard.

What I love about using stories in user experience design is that it allows me to add some of the complexity and serendipity of life to the logic and analysis that dominates work in technology.