How to leverage storytelling to engage audiences with empathy quickly
What a book on five minute stories taught me about communicating empathy
When I had five minutes to present my user research to the whole organization in a town hall, I told my user's story.
This experience allowed me to understand that a core UX skill, empathy, is directly tied to storytelling.
As UX professionals, empathy is crucial to understanding our users, but it can be counterproductive if you're the only one who understands that viewpoint.
After all, you're not making final decisions around building features or how to incorporate user needs. You must persuade decision-makers, like Product Managers and Executives, to follow your design recommendations.
You also need to communicate this empathy to the rest of the team. I unexpectedly learned how to do this when I started learning storytelling and read a book on five-minute stories.
How storytelling conveys emotions to an audience quickly
There's an IKEA commercial directed by Spike Jones that I still remember after two decades. In it, a person throws out a lamp and replaces it with another, but the framing and effects make it seem like an emotional story about loss and being replaced.
It's a silly commercial, and it ends with a man walking into the frame, pointing out the facts: "You shouldn't feel bad. The other lamp is better." However, during a 30-second advertisement, it conveyed enough emotion that I still remember it after decades. That's not a fluke.
Studies have shown that stories are about 20 times easier to recall than facts. This is why you might not be able to remember a meeting six weeks ago, but you remember the plot of Lord of the Rings or Star Wars, which you haven't seen in a decade.
This shows that you can quickly tell a story in a short amount of time and garner enough emotion for audiences to not only remember it but empathize with it as well.
But how can you get started with this? The answer, as I found out, was to find your five-second moment.
The heart of your story is a five-second moment
The 5-second moment comes from Matthew Dicks, author of Storyworthy and a 5-time Moth GrandSLAM champion.
Suppose you haven't heard of the Moth. In that case, it's one of the most competitive storytelling competitions where celebrities like Neil Gaiman and Malcolm Gladwell, along with everyday people around, come to compete through their stories.
Participants have five minutes to share their stories with a live audience of hundreds or thousands. During this time, they need to not only engage the audience but emotionally connect with them as well. Afterward, they'll be judged on how well you told your story, and a winner will be chosen at the end of the night.
While I hope your presentation is significantly less pressure than this, the advice that Dicks provides can still be beneficial when presenting to the rest of the team. To start, he says the core of any good story is the five-second moment.
The "Five Second Moment" refers to a specific, brief period that serves as a transformative experience. Rather than focus their attention on flashy changes, these moments are often quiet, emotional, and pivotal.
To give an example, he states that the "Five Second Moment" of Jurassic Park doesn't have anything to do with dinosaurs or action set pieces. It's when the main character, a man who wants to propose to his girlfriend but hates kids, is stuck in a tree with two kids.
Between answering their questions and their jokes, he begins to appreciate and love kids, which then plays into the end. In others, the five-second moment of the film is that small, significant, and personal moment that helps to transform him.
However, you don't need to be a master storyteller like Dicks to be able to make use of the Five-Second Moment in User Research. Why?
Because you already know your five-second moment. It's when users say or do something that makes you realize your current design wouldn't work.
Whether it's a user asking a question that no one had ever thought of or the user getting frustrated trying to make sense of the product, at some point in time, you realized during user research that something needed to change.
This is the change you need your team to recognize and empathize with, and if you can touch on this core part of the story in a short amount of time, you're well on your way to creating empathy for your users.
However, this isn't the only part of telling a great story. You also need to start in the right way. To understand how to do this, let's think about a company lunch.
The "company lunch test," or how to start a story
Considering a "company lunch" scenario can help you figure out the best way to start a story. Dicks talks about the "Dinner test" as a way to judge whether your story is an interesting one. However, the 'company lunch' setting is a slightly better example for our purposes.
Imagine that you're going out to lunch with your colleagues, and you're standing in line (or waiting for the food to arrive) when your colleagues ask you about your user research.
They're probably interested in the topic just long enough for the food to arrive, and they don't know much about what you're doing. In this context, ask yourself: do you need to spend most of that time setting up a lot of background? Probably not, but this is a mistake many aspiring storytellers make. They'll set up:
The project's background (like why this project started, etc.)
The research methods they used
The number of participants they tested with
The exact research methods they used
etc.
Shouldn’t you have academic (or scientific) rigor in your research methods? Of course, you should. However, you're not trying to condense everything you did over several weeks into a 5-minute conversation.
What you're trying to do is talk about the significant points of the study, highlighting things that the company cares about, with the understanding that if the person wants to learn more, they'll have a separate conversation about the specifics later.
Keeping that in mind and the co-worker interested enough to listen until the food arrives can help you figure out the right frame of mind to start your story.
However, that's not the only point.
What are the stakes (that your audience can understand)?
You've seen the user's frustration or heard user responses, so you know what's at stake if you fail to address these problems: an unhappy user or an unused product. However, we may need to tie those stakes to something the audience may understand to convey this point correctly.
To go back to Jurassic Park, people wouldn't see a movie solely about that five-second moment: if you heard a film was about a man who hates children learning to love them, that might not interest you at all. So, instead, there are the dinosaurs, the island, the action set pieces, and more to raise the stakes.
One thing I've learned, especially after diving into Data-Informed Design (link), was that for many teams, the stakes are the metrics. Tying specific qualitative behaviors (like three people failed to notice X) to quantitative metrics (Most user traffic doesn't go to this page) is the easiest way to engage most team members.
Whether it's user behaviors, patterns, general themes, or quotes, these are rich qualitative data that can add context and stakes to the user research session: finding these things out and how they tie to the metrics businesses care about are often enough to keep your audience interested.
Crafting your ending around a changed perspective
Ideally, a great story will come full circle with a changed perspective. In the case of user research, the idea is that you've introduced the major user problems at the beginning of the piece, and now that you're circling back to those themes.
However, because you've provided enough evidence, it's not just you making this statement; your stakeholders also think similarly and are willing to take action to support these actions.
This is how you can bring together a story that garners empathy in a short amount of time.
Storytelling is a way to get others to empathize with your user
You're not always going to have enough time or resources to convey everything about user research in detail properly.
Sometimes, you're given about five minutes at the end of a meeting or demo to discuss everything you've found.
When you're forced into these situations, you might be scratching your head, wondering what are the top priorities to convey during this time. Rather than deliver a bulleted list of top points, what's often more helpful is to tell a story around your users.
The Moth, and the tradition of the 5-minute story, is an engaging way to generate empathy around topics quickly and, more importantly, get people invested in what you're talking about.
This is one reason why storytelling in this way can be so crucial. After all, one of your primary duties as UX professionals is to advocate for and empathize with the user. It's their story that you're telling, but they may not have the right words (or the chance) to describe what they need.
Learning to tell their story and, based on your expert opinion, understand what changes need to be made allows you to tell their stories and help the business understand what they need to do to address their needs.
So, if you ever find yourself short on time and needing to advocate for users, tell a story. This is often the best approach to get people invested in their needs quickly.
Kai Wong is a Senior Product Designer, Data-Informed Design Author, and Top Design Writer on Medium. His new free book, The Resilient UX Professional, provides real-world advice to get your first UX job and advance your UX career.