Design storytelling should be from the user’s perspective, not yours

“I don’t work for [this company]. I work for the users.” This quote, by a Lead Product Designer to the CEO, helped illustrate a subtle shift we always need to keep in mind when communicating about our users.

Design storytelling is one of the most potent design communication tools to persuade our team to make hard but valuable decisions for our users. However, we often make a critical mistake when learning to tell stories: we tell our story from the wrong point of view.

I’ve made this mistake before: I’ve jumped straight into insights from user testing, making it about all the work I did without ever really adequately introducing who our user is. You might have, as well.

You are not the main character in your design stories; your users are. Shifting how you present your work to this perspective will lead to more success in persuading your team.

Here’s why that matters more in design storytelling than you might think.

Make sure your main character, the user, isn’t a faceless entity

Every story, from children’s books to fantasy novels, requires a main character. After all, why would you read a book consisting of several hundred pages about someone you don’t know or care about?

Even nonfiction stories, like Design stories, focus on people. While a nonfiction book may focus on central themes, insights, and concepts, they are often tied to historical examples of people or are focused on you, the reader, to get you invested.

For example, the Psychology of Money, a nonfiction book about how human psychology affects how we think about money, offers historical examples of people encountering each lesson to help tell a story about why this matters.

We’d object to listening to a story about a faceless main character with no defining features. However, we often jump to telling…