How translating user stories into value stories can drive action
Communicating designs isn’t enough: Translate your design recommendations into value stories
I’ve been seeing an increasing number of designers who don’t realize that design communication is a two-way street.
There’s been an increasing focus on soft skills, like design communication, to navigate this turbulent job market. However, this doesn’t just mean teaching your team about the UX point of view.
It also means knowing enough about the business's priorities to translate user findings and design recommendations into terms they understand.
When I say that, people often think this means learning about KPIs, metrics, and related subjects. While learning those terms is helpful, that’s not the only way to translate designs for the business.
One other, more straightforward way of doing this is translating your customer story into a value story.
Customer and value stories: understanding the different focuses
In Kindra Hall’s “Stories that Stick,” she introduces two specific story types, the customer and the value story, that are key to understanding the mindset of both UX and Product.
As UX professionals, we gravitate towards wanting to tell a Customer story. These are flawed, imperfect stories that our users provide about the individual user experience, whether through user testing, interviews, or other methods.
We aggregate these stories into larger themes to give essential summaries of critical points (like 4/5 users had trouble on this page). We list usability problems, prioritize them by how common and severe they are, and recommend specific actions.
This may be enough for minor changes like button placement or text, but you may have firsthand experience with how difficult it is to convince your team to take harder (or more costly) actions through these stories.
Businesses aren’t necessarily looking for a customer story; they’re looking for a value story. A value story centers around expressing a product's intrinsic values, benefits, and unique selling points. Rather than focusing on the users themselves, it focuses on how the product interacts with those users.
As a result, Products are often focused on “Aha Moments,” where the user realizes the value of using the product instead of providing a good user experience.
So, translating your customer story into one that focuses on value can be incredibly helpful in helping your team understand and engage with what you found.
You might think that UX cannot tell this story. After all, such stories might involve statements like “We expect this design change will impact Adoption rates by 6%,” which qualitative research can’t show.
However, that’s not always the case. One of the greatest value stories (and marketing campaigns) didn’t use facts, figures, or even spoken words to convince people; it just showed the intrinsic value of using their product.
Value stories, Apple, and the most critical question for translation
The “shot on iPhone” marketing campaign was a massive success, not just convincing people to buy an expensive phone. It also made its way into Internet culture with memes about it.
It was a ton of free marketing for Apple, and if you were a business executive, you would’ve wanted a campaign like that for your product.
But here’s the weird thing: it was a marketing campaign to showcase the iPhone's great new camera for recording high-definition videos and photos, but they never mentioned a single detail about it. Many advertisements didn’t even show a phone.
Nobody would have paid attention if the campaign were just like any other, with words like “HD camera capable of recording 4K video” plastered over a phone with a black background. That’s the traditional value-based approach to quantifying why your phone is superior.
However, the “Shot on iPhone” commercials focused on a different aspect of value that appealed more to users: what is the value that a user will get if they buy this product?
The TV commercials (and print ads) focused on showcasing random, funny, and cool photos and videos with only 3–4 words shown: Shot on iPhone (6/7/X/etc.)
As a result, the unspoken message about value was loud and clear: Here are all these fantastic new photos that our users have shot on iPhone, and if you buy an iPhone, you can do that too.
That’s what telling a value story is about, and it can be very powerful. Rather than saying, “Our new software will improve your efficiency by 20%,” show the story of the user who can leave work on time because this software saves time.
You might think that’s great for Apple, but I’m just a regular person. I don’t have the resources, budget, or more to create these value-based stories. Except, you have the basics from your customer story: all you need to do is translate that into a value story.
Translating user findings (and customer stories) into value stories
So, let’s take specific user finding, such as three out of five users getting frustrated when trying to check out.
You might add the additional detail that they were frustrated because the form fields ran counter to how most e-commerce platforms do it, so they often started filling in the wrong information before correcting it.
For example, your credit card number might be in your address field or vice versa. Highlighting this usability problem and telling your team about it in a ‘customer testimonial’ way might convince them to change things.
However, we can translate this into a value story by focusing on a few questions.
Does the task intrinsically have value, or is it taking us to an “Aha moment”?
This often involves focusing on the user workflow and digging out those “Aha moments” (which your product has sometimes created). For example, the checkout process intrinsically has value because the user purchases a product (and the business gets revenue).
On the other hand, the search results page focuses on bringing us to an “Aha moment,” which is about the user finding precisely what they’re looking for. Understanding this value is critical to the next steps.
What is the user’s problem/stakes around the task?
This is often where you’d put your user findings but with a slightly different focus. We need to spell out not only what problems the user is running into but also why they matter. Usually, this depends on the first question: if the task intrinsically has value, for example, then getting confused by checking outputs finding this value at stake.
What do you recommend to fix this issue?
This last question is where you would put your typical design recommendations or findings. As you can see from the questions above, not much has changed from your typical story.
In the example above, we might change our focus slightly. From a usability perspective, we might want to talk about “Error rate” or “Additional time on task,” which might be okay in some circumstances.
However, user friction is more straightforward to discuss (and translate). If we don’t fix this, more users will get stuck on the page and possibly not check out (i.e., get to that value point).
While it is helpful to mention certain UX metrics, such as adoption or revenue being affected, we don’t have to focus entirely on it. Telling a story about why the user isn’t finding value in your product can be a way to persuade your team to take action.
Value may be controversial, but it’s necessary to persuade audiences
Is value a loaded term at this moment? Of course. It’s become an ugly word in the UX community, with Designers being gaslit around “The value you bring to the team”.
However, when the business mentions value, they’re not (hopefully) asking you to justify your existence. Instead, they ask, "Can you translate your findings into something I can understand?” Being able to do this, with your design communication skills, is a critical part of using your soft skills to persuade your team.
Storytelling is one of those near-universal ways, across all domains, to persuade your team to do that. While it’s essential to understand the ROI of UX and some of its business value, the ability to translate your findings, user stories, and more into ones that speak about value may be more relevant in your daily life.
So, if you want to understand how to provide “value,” understand the value-based story. It provides a way to respond to such loaded terms and persuades your team to take action by presenting user findings in terms your business can understand.
I’m finishing up a redesigned Maven course on Data Informed Design. If you want to learn this valuable skill, consider joining the waitlist.
Kai Wong is a Senior Product Designer and writer for the Data and Design newsletter. His book, Data-Informed UX Design, provides 21 small changes you can make to your design process to leverage the power of data and design.