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A simple, time-tested framework for telling effective stories around UX
One of the things that has accelerated my Design career has been learning the art of UX storytelling.
This is because UX Storytelling, and making use of it, depends on applying six words: we hear facts but feel stories.
You’ve probably encountered that problem before. You’ve tried to get your team to listen to your design recommendation or make certain decisions, but they’re unmoved by what you say. A lot of the time that occurs because you’re just telling them the facts.
To understand why sticking with facts doesn’t help, we must understand how people make decisions.
The data pyramid, or why UX “facts” always tend to lose
Imagine you’re in a user research presentation, and both you and a stakeholder provide a fact:
You: 3/5 users found onboarding frustrating, so we recommended simplifying concepts and re-doing the onboarding
Lead Engineer: Your design recommendation will take 60 hours to develop.
The Product Manager listens to both facts and says, “Okay, it’s good that you found that, but we’ll worry about onboarding later down the road.” What just happened? You lost the argument due to unseen context.
You see, when the Engineer spoke and said it takes 60 hours, it’s not just that the number itself is high: there are other pieces of context that the Product Manager knows that turn that fact into a decision. For example:
Engineering typically attributes 30 hours of work to a sprint, so building this feature will take two sprints
We’re already barely ahead of schedule for a Q3 2025 release, so adding two extra sprints will put us behind
My bonus is paid on whether I deliver things on time or not, so I need to keep on schedule,
etc.
The quantitative fact (60 hours) is easy to incorporate into the Product Manager’s body of knowledge, so those facts are easy to work with and understand.
On the other hand, what do 3/5 users being “frustrated” mean? First, business decisions aren’t made around emotions, so a user being “Frustrated” doesn’t mean much. In addition, does 3/5 users mean that 60% of all users will be affected? Probably not: it’s too small a sample size for this to occur.
People build knowledge (and make decisions) using a concept known as the DIKW or Data pyramid model. This pyramid consists of four steps: (Raw) Data, Information, Knowledge, and Wisdom.
However, this pyramid shows that to move from Information to Knowledge, you need context. Unfortunately, this is why UX facts fail: your team might not have the context necessary to parse and interpret your results to create knowledge.
You’ve seen the users struggling, banging their hands on the keyboard. But if you just aggregate user results, you’re not helping to provide the necessary context to drive your audience to understand it.
This is where UX storytelling and Problem-Agitation-Solution can help.