Elevate your design work with storytelling

In the four years that I’ve been a Design Manager at Monzo, I’ve seen designers present their work to the wider company, leadership, or with their peers hundreds of times. They might have different goals for sharing their work with each of these audiences, but a key thing to all of these settings is telling the story of the design work in a way that resonates with the audience.

Because Monzo is a mission-driven company, it’s really important that designers are able to showcase how they're solving a real customer problem, or removing a barrier to make money work for everyone. We need to be able to explain what we’re aiming to do, how we’re approaching the problem and the impact it will have on Monzo and our customers. It’s critical to capture the attention of busy people and help them understand our work in a concise way.

We regularly need to share work with Product leadership teams. This group is often better set up to give helpful feedback when we stay more zoomed out, focusing on the high level goals and identifying clear asks from the group. If our audience doesn’t understand what we’re trying to do or know where we need support, the conversation can drift and become unhelpful. It’s the job of us, as presenters, to make sure we’re sharing the key bits of context we need to help move the work forward.

This also carries through to situations like sharing design work with our cross disciplinary product teams. As much as we’d love every team member to come to all the research sessions, or understand the rational behind every design decision, they might not have all the context we do.

So how can we get our wider team up to speed so they have the pieces of context they really need to make informed decisions when we’re not there? How can we keep people engaged when we’re talking about work, or avoid seeing people’s eyes glaze over as they switch to Slack? How can we get very focused on what our goals are and what we need from our audience? Taking this even further, how can we engage our audience and leave them feeling inspired about the work we’re trying to do?

We really want our designers to tell the story of their work with clarity, focus, and hopefully a little pizazz. In order to get the team thinking more about this subject we recently held a workshop about storytelling with Ben Sauer, author of ‘Death by Screens’.

In his book Ben talks about how we tend to share lots of facts or figures thinking data will convince people to come to our way of thinking. This approach often falls short and so we shouldn’t undervalue the importance of storytelling.

People connect to stories in a really primal way, because we’ve evolved using stories as a timeless and effective method of communication. In fact, the Greek philosopher Aristotle was forming the basis of storytelling as part of rhetoric in 4BCE. His ideas are still used to frame public speaking techniques today.

Ben came and talked to our teams about the importance of storytelling and gave us compelling examples and fun exercises to help us think about things differently (he’s also kindly said I can share some of what we learned).

Ben got us all thinking about different ways we can frame the story of our work so that it captures our audience’s attention. He gave a great example of two different ways of phrasing the same thing to illustrate how story telling can impact the way you grasp and remember a point someone’s trying to make.

1. (Just the facts) “Twitter is a chaotic startup that became accidentally successful.”

2. (Mark Zuckerberg’s memorable take) "Twitter is clown car that fell into a goldmine.”

If you think about it, both of these sentences are saying pretty much the same thing, but the second phrase really captures your imagination. The image of a clown car driving into a goldmine is going to stick with you for a lot longer.

In one exercise, Ben got us to think of stories that contain useful lessons about design innovation. Then he asked to identify the themes of the story, and think about when that story might be useful.

I was amazed about just how many interesting stories our team came up with. One great example came from one of our lead designers, Yulia, who shared the story of how burdock seeds getting stuck to clothing inspired the creation of Velcro, and how we might look to nature for serendipitous design inspiration.

Sharing a story like this could remind your team of the variety of places we could take inspiration from, or help them to remember to reflect and be in the moment. Inspiration can come from anywhere, and nature has so many lessons to teach us.

We’ve all heard so many interesting design stories in our lives, how can we find opportunities to share these and help illustrate something we’re sharing in our own design work?

In the second exercise, we paired Monzo product features (like bill splitting) with seemingly unrelated themes (like agriculture) to create a new metaphors. We were each randomly assigned a feature and a theme and asked to use it to create a new metaphor for that feature so it could be better understood. This was a fantastic exercise that helped get us thinking about topics we’ve probably all thought about a million times in new ways.

Something I’ve never really paid attention to is how much of a story can rely on what holds it together - the connecting words, rather than the content itself. If you just say “and then… and then… and then…” your story isn’t going to be all that interesting, but if you use connecting words like 'but' or 'however', you’ll add tension and drama to your story. People will want to know what will happen next.

Bad story: I graduated and then I joined the circus and then I met the human cannonball and then he told me how he got his job.

Good story: I graduated with no plan so I joined the circus, therefore I met some crazy characters like the human cannonball, but his story was nothing like I imagined.

(Story courtesy of Jeff Gothelf)

Looking at these two examples really highlights the difference words can make. Even these small changes in framing can add drama to our product narratives and build empathy with the problems our customers face.

It’s easy for designers to get lost in all of the details we’re keen to share, and forget to focus on the key bits of information our audience really needs to know. Choosing not to share every interesting design decision or fascinating thing we heard from customers is difficult, but sharing too much just leads to cognitive overload for your audience.

Get tight on a cohesive narrative, and repeat it over and over again so key takeaways stick with your audience.

In Death by Screens, Ben wrote about framing a design vision in terms of a traditional story arc. In a classic story arc the hero starts with the status quo, until disaster strikes followed by an upward battle for resolution with our hero ending up better off then they were before.

This type of framing is so useful for something like explaining the relevance of a new feature.

1. Customer is going about their day to day life

2. They encounter a problem

3. Our feature steps in to help them

4. They end up in a better place then they were before

Using a story arch to explain a feature or design solution isn’t changing the framing, but it can help you think about how you might capture your audience’s attention. Or it can add a bit of flare to how you’re telling the story, building empathy with the customer and relating to the problem we’re trying to solve for them.

I hope these tips and tricks have been helpful. I’m a big believer in storytelling as a way of elevating a design solution, helping your audience understand why your design matters and the importance of the problem it’s solving.

Our need for even clearer, concise, cross-functional communication has been growing at Monzo. Ben’s workshop and his book have given our team tools we can use to nail our communication with both our colleagues and customers.

For more tips on great storytelling and lots of great tips on running effective meetings, go treat yourself to Ben’s book, and check out his workshop!

If you love storytelling, and making customer problems your problems, check out our open roles!