Storytelling in Design

Chapter 2. The Anatomy of a Great Story

[ 2 ]

The Anatomy of a Great Story

The Architect Analogy of Explaining UX

The first blog post I wrote and published was “An Information Architect vs. a Normal Architect.”1 It’s from 2010. In it, I explain what I do for a living by drawing parallels between planning out a house and planning out online experiences and strategies. Ever since I was a little girl back in southern Sweden, I’ve been fond of analogies and metaphors that can capture the imagination and make you see something, whether it’s actually there in front of you physically, or is just a mental image in your head.

Creating stories has always been my way of articulating and connecting things, from aspirations to drawing parallels between what’s going on in my life and the people and experiences I encounter. I hold a love for piecing things together, and I’ve often talked about how being a UX designer is a bit like being a spider. Not in the sense of a creature that kills its prey and eats it, but one that carefully spins its intricate web, makes everything come together, and has an overview of everything that is going on—how it’s all connected and how a change over on one end will affect everything else.

The spider analogy might not be that common. But the analogy between information architecture, or UX design, and building a house is, and I am in no way the first to come up with it. That said, it’s been the way I’ve responded to and later preempted the blank stare that usually ...