story

PROJECT TITLE: True Story Design

Problem: As projects come and go, there are familiar processes/phases necessary to finding a successful solution. Understanding the targeted user(s) is always key to success, but we had been getting a little bored with ‘personas’. We weren’t inspired. Our current charter was to create personas to design to for the next generation of real time communication and collaboration services for Microsoft. I had just read a story in Wired magazine that described a team of people who had a high risk, high reward job description and I thought: AHA! These people need our services! I told the writer, instead of personas, we should just tell this TRUE story and how a sad ending would be avoided if we had gotten to them before their harrowing adventure had started.

Approach: Throw out personas and design against character-driven stories. We had identified fundamental user needs within the story, so instead of manufacturing ux flows against personas, we simply exposed ux flows where it was relevant to the characters furthering along…

Solution: We presented our story to our UX director and he was elated. He insisted we apply this process to the other marketing segments we were going after and we developed a master presentation for our VP, who presented to the CEO. Funding for various efforts were given the go ahead and blah, blah. As a bi-product, the writer and I thought we should submit our learnings to the larger, UX community at the annual Microsoft UX day.