See a photo of Whitney, her bio, Part 1 of this Q&A, and Part 2.
Q&A with Whitney Quesenbery, Question 3:
Q: The storytelling movement seems to be growing explosively. Why now? What is it about this moment in human history and culture that makes storytelling so resonant with so many people right now?
A: In my world of user experience — which usually means technology-mediated experiences — I think it’s about finding ways to connect. We are craftspeople, in the sense that we make things for other people to use. But we often have a very tenuous relationship with those people.
Think about how strange it is to have a group of people working on
software or a web application who have no real, practical understanding of the daily lives of the people who will use what they create. This is very different from the lives of traditional crafts people. When you built a house, or made a tool, you could see and touch the world and lives it would be part of.
Technology is such a paradox: it allows us to connect in so many new ways, but it also allows us to be apart.
Stories are a way of rebuilding that connection. There are many ways to tell user experience stories: personas, scenarios, comics, storyboards. They are all ways of letting us see more than just the technology we work with, and give us a window into the context of the user experience.
This is increasingly important now because of how pervasive technologies are in our lives. We need to understand all the possibilities and variations. Stories help us do that.