Storytelling in Design

Chapter 3. Storytelling for Product Design

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Storytelling for Product Design

When Any Device, Used Anywhere and at Any Time, Is Your Starting Point

Back in 2011 Luke Wroblewski, an internationally recognized digital product leader tweeted: “So how do you do anything if everything, anybody, anywhere, & anytime are your use cases?” (@lukew, May 12, 2011). Though I didn’t have a clear answer, the topic of his tweet got me excited and kept my mind buzzing for the rest of the week. So much so, that I ended up submitting a proposal for a talk to a conference, which resulted in my first public speaking appearance and, as an extension of that, why you’re reading this book today.

A lot has happened since that day in 2011, and it’s even more fascinating to think about just how much our lives have changed since Apple released the first iPhone in 2007. Before then, we were limited to going online at work or at home, or to using a Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) browser—a web browser for mobile devices—on our phones. WAP was introduced in 1999, but what we experienced when browsing using WAP didn’t look anything like those websites we’d visit on our laptops or desktops (Figure 3-1).

By 2010 WAP had been replaced by more modern standards, and today most internet browsers of modern handsets fully support HTML, allowing us to experience the web the way it’s intended to look and work. This development has drastically changed things. In 2009, only 0.7% of all global web pages were served ...