Storytelling for Designers – 3 techniques to present your designs

The speaker, a product designer at Dropbox, introduces the importance of storytelling for designers. She highlights how designers often struggle to explain their work and resort to common, unengaging frameworks. The video aims to provide three techniques to present designs in a more engaging way, useful for various scenarios like pitching to clients, crafting case studies, or presenting internal strategies.

The first technique discussed is the narrative arc, a common storytelling structure used in movies and books. It involves a beginning with little action, a rising intensity to a climax, and then a gradual reduction in intensity towards a peaceful ending. The speaker explains how to apply this to a design review, starting with broad context, detailing the design exploration process, revealing the final solution as the climax, and concluding with specific feedback requests.

The second technique is the Hero's Journey, focusing on a structured sequence of events to keep a story engaging. It describes a protagonist's journey from an 'ordinary world', receiving a 'call to adventure' (often initially rejected), meeting a 'mentor', crossing a 'threshold' into an 'unknown world' with obstacles and allies, facing a 'climax' or 'big fight', and finally returning to the ordinary world as a changed hero with a reward. This framework is particularly useful for portfolio reviews or case studies.

The speaker then translates the Hero's Journey into a designer's context. The 'ordinary world' is the current product state, the 'call to adventure' comes from leadership or user pain points, the 'mentor' is data, and crossing the 'threshold' is entering the unknown of finding a solution. The 'obstacles' are wireframing, testing, and technical limitations, leading to the 'big fight' of design iterations, culminating in a successful 'shipped' design and user reaction as the 'reward', improving the product (the 'new' ordinary world).

The third technique, the Undeniable Story, is about selling a vision or strategy. Unlike traditional problem-solution approaches that can disengage an audience, this method starts by presenting a grandiose future vision ('seeing' phase). Then, it makes the audience 'feel' the obstacles preventing that vision and how they can help. Finally, in the 'believing' phase, data (quantitative and qualitative) is used to back up the opportunity, not just the problem, focusing on potential gains like revenue. This approach aims to convince even skeptics of the validity of the vision.

The video concludes by summarizing the three techniques: the narrative arc for intensity modulation, the hero's journey for structured storytelling, and the undeniable story for convincing others of a vision. The speaker encourages viewers to apply these techniques in their own design presentations and share their experiences.