Speaker: Tobias Komischke
Tell us about a time when storytelling had a positive impact on your work.
Tobias Komischke: Hi, I'm Tobias. Um A situation when storytelling had a positive influence on my work was when we tried to convey findings about our users for a product that we were actually building. And so we decided to use personas um to make the information about those users relatable and also memorable. Um So we had lots of stats, stats from, from user research, but you cannot remember those, you can just like give them numbers. And so um we wanted to really paint a concrete picture of our audience and provide context around um the uh persons that use our product. And so um what we did was um the translated the findings that we had into personas and then relate and presented those personas to our internal audiences, different teams. And so, for example, we had life size cutouts of um yet I think three different personas and yet we have cut outs that were like as tall as normal people, they were just flat because they were paper cutouts. But um we, we, we tried to map that image of, of that user to the information we relate people through storytelling. Um Like you were describing you know what um that person does, what that person cares for. Um what kind of things the person will do with our product. So it was not just providing numbers, it was providing things and, and, and, and, and truth, truths about um our users, we also um put some narratives about these um personas on place mats and, and put those place mats in our cafe area. Like when people have lunch, they would actually put their plates down on, on placemats and those placements where each one of them was presenting a different persona again with the image so that people then can relate the other content of the placements to the life cut uh cut out. Um And so this worked really well because it made our customers relatable to the degree where um we actually brought the life size cutouts, two meetings, right? Where for example, product management would talk about what will the next, what, what features will the next release um give to our audiences? And he would just point to that persona and said, well, what would Bob be able to profit from these new features? Like talk about how Bob actually gains any value from that, right? Just like to bring in the customer into that room where these discussions happen. And so I, I think it worked very well and um for years, we had those artifacts, those cut out, cut out the place mats and other artifacts floating around. Um our building. And so, um, I want to believe, um, they had some good impact.
Is there anything you want to add about the previous story that you were not able to answer in the five-minute limit?
Tobias Komischke: Uh, do I want to add anything? Well, you know, again, I just think that, um, if I were to tell you about a friend of mine, I would probably not go and say, well, he's 6 ft tall and £200 heavy. He's Asian and lives in Brooklyn. Right. That is a nice descriptor. But you would probably be more interested in, like, how does this person tick, what kind of person is that friend of mine? Like, so I would use adjectives and these kind of descriptors that are more rich and again, the relatable memorial then, um, just the numbers. And I think that's the idea that, um, um, you know, made us use, uh, personas to convey our target audience.
Now, tell us another story. Tell us about a time when storytelling did not work as you planned/hoped.
Tobias Komischke: I think whether storytelling works or not depends on the audience, those people who received your message um situations where storytelling didn't work very well. For me, where are those situations when I relates to a very numbers driven audience or organization? And tho those folks, they're typically like, you know, higher up like, you know, the P level people and higher C suite people and they are used from the day to day to just deal with numbers, metrics, KPIS, that kind of stuff because it allows them to compare also numbers to other numbers and that's what they live and breathe. And so, um for them, I often felt that, you know, they were like, well, that's, that's tm I, right, I guess you're telling me too much. It's like way too much noise and, and not enough signal if you just like do storytelling and, and talk about context and kind of stuff. So they just want to know, hey, what's the bottom line, you know, hurry up here. Uh And, and so for these, for these people, I, I just think that um normally they are not patient enough to even listen to a story. Um when you want to relate uh storytelling. And um uh it, it happened to me many times that I walk into a um meeting with a, an executive of, you know, AAA large company like, you know, talk um um S and P 100 and I have a slight e obviously with me and I don't even make it to slide two, like not even to slide two because, and they are so impatient and they, they feel that they know everything already even before you tell them. And so they, they just wanna like interrupt you just like talk about what they think is important and what that is, is not so much about things that you could relate in storytelling, but it's just about like the hard facts and there's only hard facts if you can express them in, in numbers. Um So, yeah, that, that's um that's my experience. So it really, really depends heavily on the um on the audience from time to time. You may run into a uh uh an executive who actually maybe heard on some TED talk or some conference that, you know, it's really about understanding users and, and customers holistically, right? And then he or she then actually may ask about like, OK, like, you know, give me like, you know, the prototypical user, you know, and what the user wants to accomplish and what like, what is the user like. But for that to happen, that person really has to have time and interest, both of which is very scarce. So, yeah, that's, uh, that's matter.
Is there anything you want to add about the previous story that you were not able to answer in the five-minute limit?
Tobias Komischke: Uh the one thing I would like to add is that I think it is very similar to the issue of using scenario based design methodology versus for example, a user story or experience, outcome driven methodology, right? So scenario based scenarios are those like informal narratives about what a user does and what a user tries to accomplish and you know, surrounding information about this. And it's been, you know, prominent like, you know, a couple of decades ago, right? Because you have like long texts that describe what about the user, right? Again, it's very informative, but you have to deal with a large corpus of text to then try to figure out, OK, one of that is really important where in this text are my requirements or, or target abilities of my product. So it's, it's it's involved to move from that text that explains two things to what is actually essential for the design. And so that is to me what storytelling is, right? It would be, you know, a scenario based, it's like based on a on a story now in recent years. And I say recent, I mean, I mean, almost like 20 years now or 15 years, the pendulum swung more towards um user story and experience outcomes because they are much easier to handle because they are much shorter, but they are like single sentence statements that say what needs to happen. And then the, the aggregation, the sum of all of these statements, you know, build basically um what your system needs people to um accomplish what, what, what this, what the system will allow people to accomplish. Um and again, right, it's, it's very clear scenarios are very informative, but they are very long and the user stories or experience outcomes, they are very, very concise and short, but because of that lack a lot of context. And so which one is better? They both have pros and cons, I can just say that um um in, in the last years, um the trend has been going to like the shorter, more concise descriptions of things.
Is there anything else you would like to tell us?
Tobias Komischke: Well, well, I just think that um storytelling is great if you want people to remember things that go beyond pure numbers, I think for that, it's great again, based on your situation and the audience this may or may not be of importance. But uh yeah, I think story storytelling um is, is, is a good thing when you can use it.
