Storytelling in Design

Chapter 14. Presenting and Sharing Your Story

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Presenting and Sharing Your Story

How Storytelling Helped Save the Day

Toward the end of 2010, we moved into a new office with Dare, and our experience planning team gained a new addition. Her name was Roz Thomas, and Roz’s background was in product design for, among others, what was then called Polly Pocket Group, a line of dolls and accessories. Roz was great at sketching up her thinking in ways that could easily be presented to the client.

At the same time, I was working on a redesign of the Sony Mobile (previously Sony Ericsson) home page in preparation for a new phone campaign. We had received some initial feedback on the first version, and in my view, what our client was asking for didn’t meet the needs of the users or the business on a global or local market level. Inspired by Roz, I took to trying to sketch out my thinking.

Exactly how I ended up with what I did, I can’t recall, but somehow my scribbles, which were initially done for my own benefit to capture my thinking, turned into a comic-style document with the home page content depicted as superheroes. I used the illustrations to tell the story of why our original version of the home page was along the right lines. Our Sony Mobile team at Dare liked it so much that rather than talk the client through our feedback verbally, I ended up taking them through my comic-style sketches (Figure 14-1). They got a great response, and as far as I can recall, the client agreed ...