A transcript of Episode 239 of UX Podcast. James Royal-Lawson, Per Axbom, and Anna Dahlström talk about storytelling in design. Everything is a story, and every product experience is a story.
This transcript has been machine generated and checked by Ruth Atamenwan.
Transcript
James Royal-Lawson
Thank you to all our transcript volunteers. You’re doing a great job of helping us make sure the transcripts are published together with the podcast. If you’d also like to help out with the podcast, just email us at hey@uxpodcast.com. That’s h-e-y or h-e-j, you choose.
Computer voice
UX podcast episode 239.
[Music]
Per Axbom
You’re listening to UX podcast coming to you from Stockholm, Sweden,
James Royal-Lawson
Helping the UX community explore ideas and share knowledge since 2011.
Per Axbom
We are your hosts, Per Axbom,
James Royal-Lawson
and James Royal-Lawson
Per Axbom
with listeners in 194 countries from Moldova to Greece
James Royal-Lawson
Anna Dahlström, UX for over 20 years, freelancer for the past 10 mentor, speaker, meetup organiser and now author.
Per Axbom
Anna recently published storytelling and design through O’Reilly Media; principles and tools for defining and designing and selling multi device design projects.
James Royal-Lawson
So we invited Anna back on to the podcast to talk to us about her book.
[Music]
Anna, you’ve been on the…. this is a third appearance on the show. But only your second as a guest. Because you joined us. You were hosting the 200th episode of UX podcast along with Lisa Welchman.
Anna Dahlström
I was, thank you very much for having me around. That was very special and a very good chat.
James Royal-Lawson
The first time we had you on the show it was way back in 2014. When you joined us to talk about deliverables.
Anna Dahlström
I did yeah.
Per Axbom
Six years ago.
James Royal-Lawson
…when we were all just children.
Anna Dahlström
Yep.
Per Axbom
So tell us the story of how you went from there to get into this passion of storytelling and even writing a book about it.
Anna Dahlström
Well, my dad’s he’s a writer. And I’ve just moved back home to Sweden, but when I lived in Copenhagen, when I lived in London, I go home, my dad who’s very fond of making trips, trips around Sweden just going nowhere, the part of Sweden where we live, we used to just talk about work, he’s very good paying interest into what I do and what my siblings do. And we started talking about work and obviously talking about his work as well.
So as we went through this walks and talked, I realised when I heard him talking about the kind of his love for piecing everything together in the books that he’s writing. I kind of realised that there’s a lot of overlaps and similarities between writing books and the work that we do.
At one point, I can’t remember exactly when it was but a conference in London User Centre Design reached out to me and asked if I wanted to do a talk and I kind of figured maybe a talk about storytelling and design could be a nice topic. So I was a little late, kind of doing the slides for my talk as sometimes happens. So I called my dad a few days before and I said, you know, what, what do you kind of, what do you think makes up the good reasons for writing a book, and as we got talking, this is kind of the talk that I was going to give kind of almost built itself because there were so many good overlaps.
So I gave that talk. And then I kind of worked, reiterated on that and gave it that some other conferences. So that was about to give it up and use in Budapest, when O’Reilly reached out to me and asked me if I was interested in doing some content for them. Whether that was kind of some online course or maybe writing a book and I was like, wow, writing about me, no, you’re crazy. I can never write a book and who am I to write a book. But then as I kind of thought about it, the more kind of the ideas I’m getting, the more I realised, you know what it would be really nice to write the book. So I reached… I kind of responded to my then contacts at MIT called Nathan said, You know what, I would actually like to write this book. So that’s kind of how it all started.
James Royal-Lawson
Maybe you can give us a little bit of a reminder, or maybe even introduce us to the anatomy of a story.
Anna Dahlström
Sure. Aristotle was the first one who kind of pointed out that the way in which to tell a story has a profound impact on the volume and experience of the same. So he said that a story is kind of something as a whole. So it has a beginning and it has a middle and it has an end. And he didn’t actually talk about three acts, but that’s kind of what it’s turned into after his time.
So, in general now a lot of people when it comes to writing scripts, for example, or plays, they still work with the kind of a three act structure. So you have your first act where you get introduced to you and to your main character. And then at the end of that act, they kind of realise, you know, they are faced with a kind of dramatic question that changes everything where you kind of go, will life ever be the same for the main character, and then you come into the second act when you learn more about your main character, and they learn more about themselves.
So they usually find themself in a worse situation before things kind of gets a bit better. And to us, the second act is kind of a biting point again, which leads to the third act, which is where you have your climax and you find out, if life ever got to the same and if the boy and the girl actually ended up happily together. When it comes to, kind of the anatomy of a good story, I guess the story should have that kind of beginning, a middle and an end and it doesn’t have to be something that’s that’s linear.
Always starts right at the beginning, you could start start in the future and then jump backwards and forwards. But there needs to be some kind of a theme in there. what we can I mean Swedish talk about kind of s a birthright as well, something that binds everything together that gives the story a purpose, and that kind of has a message behind what you’re trying to say.
So I mean, there’s so many things to what makes a good story, obviously, you need to have your characters and the characters they need to have some kind of character arc, some kind of development that they go through, something that makes you vetted into the character and kind of makes you want to follow them and find out what actually happens to them. And there needs to be some suspension and some tension that pulls you in and makes you turn the page so you want to find out what happens next.
Lots of different things, I guess. But those are the main things that you have a narrative structure to your story in one way In other words, that’s carefully planned, whether that happens a bit more as you kind of, as you kind of write things,
Per Axbom
What strikes me is when you start understanding the complexities of storytelling, and everything that goes on and how much you have to keep in your head with the character development, and the environments, and, your eye on the goal. I mean, it sounds so difficult to bring all of that into the design space to what is UX and digital design. And what does that look like? How is that brought over to our world?
Anna Dahlström
This is again, where the fascination in me grew because there’s so many overlaps. So I’m a big believer in that in the beginning of a project, everything is chaotic, and it’s all up in the air. And that’s actually a good thing that k is is something that we should embrace and really kind of, not be scared of and not try to pinpoint down too soon.
But you need to start getting all of your kind of ideas out and need to realise what’s relevant and what is not relevant. And the only way to do that is really by understanding the different moving parts. And when it comes to writing a book, so obviously, I researched how people go about writing a book, and I had my own experience of writing a book as well, there’s numerous ways you can go about it, some prefer to have a lot more kind of a structured approach.
And for me, when it came to writing this book, when a publisher reaches out, if you reaches out to publisher, they often ask you to produce an outline. So an outline is, you know, an overview of each kind of chapter that the book will include. And then a bit of a summary of what that chapter would be about. And then obviously, talking about the audience for the book and why it’s relevant and how it compares to other books out there. So having that outline up front, when you write something really helps you structure that story.
And in the same way when it comes to product, product design, the UX design, having that structure of what the experience actually is the full end to end experience will also help you structure things and really think things through so a lot of the time when I work with teams and individuals, I see them getting jumping straight in. And not really considering the full picture, they get very bogged down into the view or the page that they’re on or one particular kind of journey without understanding how that fits into the bigger picture.
But also, more importantly, how that fits into people’s lives. Because in the end, everything that we do, it’s for people, and it’s not for people as a group is for individual people. It needs to resonate with individual people in order to provide some value. And that’s where actually understanding the story of people understanding our product story and see how those two fit together. That’s where applying kind of principle for storytelling and also just in general thinking about that everything is a story.
Every product experience is a story if you sat in front of a computer, doing something that has a story running to it like right now I’m sitting recording this podcast and before recording this podcast, I had to put a baby to sleep, I made myself a nice little cup of coffee. And I sat down and tried to do something nice around it.
And that would have been a different experience if my daughter didn’t fall asleep. And if I spilled the coffee or if, you know, something f*****d up, excuse my language, but you know, those things are really important when it comes to us doing things online, understanding the context around things because that impacts people’s experience with it, with the product or service that we’re going to use as well.
When I lived in London, I saw someone using the self checkout machine, and they got stuck. They had to pay by card but they just got stuck and they wanted to pay with with coins and notes and it just wasn’t an option to pay with cash. So understanding the frustration surrounding this will help you understand how to deliver better experience as well.
James Royal-Lawson
Given that every experience is unique. So effectively every story is unique. How do we then as designers manage all those multiple combinations or multiple themes or red threads that are happening all the time with what we designed?
Anna Dahlström
We honestly can’t you know, if we are designing our experiences and doing user journeys or doing personas, what it is, we can’t do that for every single user who’s going to be using a product or service that’s just not realistic. It’s not valuable, but it’s understanding. It’s understanding the nuances of things. It’s about making sure that you don’t just stop at your main audience, but you understand the variations of your audience, that you understand the backstories and the different kind of backstories that comes to it.
We work a lot with custom experience maps, for example. And those are great for piecing different things together. And so there’s sometimes a tendency now when things are so complex and everything, you know, there’s not one star to a journey anymore.
There used to be time when we kind of knew that people would arrive on homepage and then they would literally go through your website page by page until they got to kind of the end of it. But right now we’re so short when we seard, a lot of people are arriving right smack in the middle. And we don’t really have any control of the message that might come with that and lead them to a page because of social, for example. So for us, it’s very much about making sure that we, when we deliver or we work on the products, experiences that we work on, we understand that irrespectively on where you are in that product experience, you understand where that part of the story, that part of the experience sits and the bigger experience stories that speak and how is it connected to kind of before and too often to the different goals that users actually have in there as well.
For me, I’ve been freelance for a long time and sometimes you get a push back because people they want to get progress quite quickly. And so, for me, it’s actually about spending a bit more time upfront, just understanding the context and the people and the situations. In the problem area in a really profound way before you start doing too much work, so not getting, not just strudy working on things, but actually understanding all the different sides of it. And then it’s easy to filter out what matters and what doesn’t.
Per Axbom
I just love how you reflect on the choose your own adventure stories, in that there’s no linear way that people go through websites that we usually map out these user stories. And they always look linear. Yeah, but if we acknowledge them as user, it’s usually an adventure stories, I guess, then you acknowledge that people can go in all different directions.
Anna Dahlström
Yeah, they can. And there’s… that’s another fascination, I guess, I think, as a general kind of theme or kind of if you’re going to keep one thing in mind of how people experience things at the moment, it is very much a choose your own adventure story. So in traditional stories, you know, the writer is the one who tells the story and they kind of dictate what the story is like.
So you know, page by page, you go to the next one, and you don’t as a reader, you don’t actually have a say in how the story evolves. Whereas in two serenity stories, the reader becomes the kind of protagonist and they make the decisions and based on the decisions they make, that determines what happens next in the story.
And that’s very much how it is nowadays, you know, at any given point, though, users can decide to abandon a product or service or they can go to competitor or they can skip something. And, you know, we all know that people come up to how many instructions to give them, they will still ask for, you know, what about this? And what about that, then you go straight there on the page, but they didn’t see it.
So it’s very much about trying to choreograph and kind of narrate things in a way that it can work, no matter in which order that people will come about and experience and actually, of course, it doesn’t apply to the absolutely everything because some things are going to be linear ordering processes and so forth where you know, it’s not about the use of choosing what to do, but we have to do things in a linear way. In general, when it comes to websites and looking for information and researching things. It’s very much a kind of a, the user decides what to do and in which order and what they want to take in or not.
James Royal-Lawson
You’ve got to make sure you catered for a number of variations within that part of the journey, just like you were doing an adventure story.
Anna Dahlström
Yeah, it is. And it’s, you know, we always when we map out and do user journeys, we often do the Happy journey, we forget about all of the, the nuances and the levels that can come between the happy and the unhappy journey.
There’s a great exercise and kind of actually mapping out what their Happy journey will look like and then doing the exact opposite. So what’s the unhappy equivalent of this moment? What would that mean? And then in between that actually mapping out so if there was just a little bit unhappy or a little bit less happy, what would that actually mean? And if you do that, you start to figure out that there could be so many different levels of experience, I guess, and when you then again, kind of combine that into the wider business side of things.
So thinking about customer support, if you know, you know, if you order something, for example, and it becomes delayed or you don’t get it ordered notification, or there’s no way of tracking things like there always needs to be a response to that, there always needs to be a way of… kind of continuing on that journey and that story to help in the user belong on that path. And no matter if it’s a happy or unhappy one.
So understanding what the main happy one is, because obviously, we want things to be happy, but it’s seldom frictionless for people this is usually something happens along the way that kind of digressed things a little bit. And those are the kind of nuances that really important and we’re turning to the kind of concepts or main plots and subplots in traditional storytelling can be quite useful.
And as you know, again, something I found fascinating is that people in traditional storytelling have ways of visualising these things and visualising the different storylines and a different kind of narrative arcs. in there, which I think is quite an applicable way of bringing something to life in product design as well.
James Royal-Lawson
I think it’s really interesting to think about how much we do focus on the good stories and we ignore tragedies, we ignore the bad things. But guess because it’s sometimes it’s very hard to deal with some of those. In a business context, you don’t really want to focus on when things go wrong, or when things don’t go as you maybe hoped they would, or your manager wants them to go. That gives us a challenge.
Anna Dahlström
Yeah, no, absolutely. But it’s also I mean, not gonna talk through the experience or talk through the exam, because it is a bit of a morbid one. But, you know, there’s massive examples at the moment when it comes to Facebook, kind of remembering what happened nine years ago, and serving ads and so forth online where, you know, in looking at what’s being served to the user, we forget the bigger context, and we forget that actually serving this ad at this point might not be a good thing.
You know, at the moment, of course, with Coronavirus, everyone can kind of identify or kind of feel empathy with people and kind of understand what it’d be like if you lost someone, for example. So having that understanding and knowing that sometimes life is grim, and there’s certain points that you might not want to be reminded of people might go through different really hard things financially or in their own relationship at home, and all of our things actually, kind of that impacts a lot of things online as well.
Per Axbom
It’s interesting, because it seems then that in a business context, you really only want to acknowledge emotions that are happy, and it’s almost like the other emotions are not allowed or you and you don’t even talk about them. Whereas people of course, contain multitudes and you need to allow for all the emotions to happen.
Anna Dahlström
You do and that’s what you know, when you look at what makes the story real, it’s about including those aspects into our story because life isn’t linear, there is ups and downs. And in a good story that needs to be ups and downs as well, there needs to be some kind of tension, otherwise, the story becomes flat and the characters don’t really develop. And similarly, when in product design, we need to accommodate and think about those different nuances as well. And I’m very much a believer in that as much as possible.
We need to do what’s really, really good for our users and try to help them along in their lives and removing frictions and removing tension and kind of mental overload is a big, big part of that. And for that we need to understand also the unhappy side of things. Otherwise, it’s taking things at a bit to higher level and I believe that’s what I believe brings the best experience to life and helps the business, if it’s good for the users and if it helps people, then it will help the business as well.
Per Axbom
So you have a chapter called, how traditional storytelling is changing. How is it changing?
Anna Dahlström
In terms of if you’re going to write a book and save? Well, there’s various ways in which traditional storytelling are remaining the same, but also changing we see, we see now with obviously data playing a big part when it comes to what’s being produced for Netflix and for Amazon Prime, and so forth. Some of the time is really, really driving what’s being produced other times, it’s kind of just accommodating things based on that, you have kind of transmedia storytelling where you let stories unfold across media, which is very applicable to product design as well.
There was a TV show in Norway called, Skam that became really popular where you follow the group of teenagers I believe in a high school. And in between the episodes that aired each week on TV, you could follow their conversations on the websites and sit on their own Instagram and so forth and see text messages between them and Instagram posts and stuff.
So it kind of made the whole thing feel quite real. But traditional storytelling is is changing in one way as well the whole on demand culture in terms of that we we no longer sit down and wait for…. you know when I was a kid we sat down and waited for a Friday night and the Disney hour that was kind of the big highlight.
We don’t have that as much anymore, we can just binge watch things obviously waiting for the next episode of the Tiger King or whatever coming out, it is still a thing that we do. But generally we decide what to watch, when and we just kind of flip between things. So yeah, the audience again is becoming part of the story in many ways and kind of determining a lot more and having a lot more say and a lot more kind of, I want it, I want it now kind of thing.
James Royal-Lawson
We don’t have schedules in the same way TV schedules, we don’t have opening times in the same way because online shops are open 24 hours and you know a lot of that structure that may be held up our stories, or give context to our stories for free such as when we are building stuff is gone.
Per Axbom
For better or for worse, because I think that I mean, it seems that especially it’s like in times of crises, you realise that those times in your life where you are doing something together is important. So when you actually have scheduled events, those events also become important so it seems almost like there’s a struggle between on demand and scheduled events and how they actually affect your well being.
Anna Dahlström
Absolutely. And I guess one of the main things as well is that everyone nowadays is kind of a storyteller. We all share our kind of stories on Instagram or Facebook on you know, tiktok in various ways and brands also, having to adapt to how they tell a story as well is no longer there really long commercials anymore, but it’s kind of short bite sized things and needs to work across different platforms and kind of work in a different way and have a purpose behind it something that resonates with people. So the audience is becoming more more demanding, in a way, I guess. But that’s good.
Per Axbom
That’s usually interesting. I mean, so yeah, everybody is becoming a storyteller. A lot more people are storytellers now today than were before, thanks to these platforms. But does that mean that because sometimes it’s almost like these stories are being told and people are saying, they’re so authentic? Whereas you realise, the more you follow them that they’re perhaps not as authentic as they claim to be? Because they also aim to tell a story that puts them in a better light. (Yeah.) So stories are extremely powerful, but they’re also very persuasive. (Yes) which means that they can sometimes be used for harm, I guess.
Anna Dahlström
Yeah, no, absolutely. And I mean, one of the main reasons for using storytelling in product design as well it’s actually the persuasive impact it has. Because the way we process information if it’s embedded in stories is completely different, compared to when its just presented as raw facts. But you know, we talk a lot about ethics in design at the moment, so everything should be ethical. And everything should be authentic but there’s always going to be people who misuse it or who don’t completely abide by the rules, I guess.
Per Axbom
And I think it’s okay to not be authentic as long as you’re open about it. As long as you’re saying that I’m telling you a story now because I want to… there’s something else I’m after him. (Yeah) I’m looking for an emotion, but I’m not necessarily telling the whole truth.
Anna Dahlström
Yeah! Absolutely.
James Royal-Lawson
One thing I was thinking about asking briefly was that some of the things were talked about during this chat is different variations of things; adventure stories, unique stories. schedule is not been there. It feels like we have to be very packaged, modular, I think is something you mentioned in the book. How do how do we work modular with stories?
Anna Dahlström
That comes back into a bit of the choose your own adventure stories again. So if you think about in a book that’s kind of written to the audience can, you know decide the different at different points in the journey, what they want to do, there’s different nodes that brainstorm together, and then based on that, there’s going to be different kind of outcomes to it.
So, you know, there might be option one, option two, option three, so those kind of become individual modules, I guess, of that story. And then storylines following that. In product design, we you know, obviously with responsive design now and designing for various devices, we are generally working or things working with, experience being more modular because we kind of have to, but there’s a lot that you do now with technology as well as a dynamic publishing, making sure that if you know the first time you come to a website, you you need a bit more kind of background information, for example.
The second time, you might still want a bit of that background information in there because maybe you didn’t stay too long last time. Or maybe you need a bit more kind of context before you really get familiar with it. But the more of a loyal and returning user or customer you are, the less you actually you actually need those kind of this is… the kind of instructional aspect I guess.
And so there’s an opportunity there to gradually swapping out pieces of content for something that’s more relevant to people. And also tying that in with based on where you came from, or what touchpoint actually drove you to the website so you can continue that kind of journey respectively.
So there’s a big opportunity there of really again, kind of coming back to understanding the complexities and where people are coming from their backstories and what it should mean in terms of the narrative experience on your product or service afterwards. So doing the kind of referring to a bit of the choose your own adventure stories and the modularity so how you actually visualise… how you would visualise the story narrative.
Doing a similar kind of exercise for your product experience can be a really useful one in terms of understanding what needs to change at different points in terms of adding the most value and being the most relevant to users.
James Royal-Lawson
I really love… this is wonderful to think that what you’re suggesting I think is we need to listen to the story being told and use data points or use information to help us understand the story that a visitor or a user or customer is living or experiencing in order to to serve them better future parts of the story.
Anna Dahlström
Absolutely. Otherwise it becomes a one size fits all and in some instaces a one size fits all is absolutely fine. But you know, I’ve gone back to this example numerous times when I’ve talked through this but many years ago now, me and my partner, we completely refurbished our flat in London and in the loft conversion and that process kind of just going through that process there was so many learning points every single day where the builders asked us to pick out certain things like spindles, I didn’t even know being Swedish and I didnt understand the word spindles and we had to choose a bath and you know, when you start researching things, you realise there’s not one bath, there’s numerous baths and you need to make a decision on what kind of baths and all those things at the beginning, when we landed on websites, there was no, they just presented you with a choice straightaway.
There was no hand holding, no kind of background information, nothing guiding you along the way and kind of helping you make that decision. And that’s fine if you know what you’re after. But if you don’t, then it becomes a very frustrating experience and you end up leaving the website and going elsewhere to find that kind of you know…. someone who guides you through it and gives you a bit of an advice just as you would get if you walked into a store and you could ask someone for advice.
So that’s the importance and making sure you can tailor the experience based on the relevancy or the information as needing relevancy of the level of detail that they need as well. Like you said, it’s not it’s not us, it’s not our story. It’s our story combined with the user, the person on the other end is going to be using it needs to resonate with them in order for it to be a successful experience. So the more we understand about the people who are going to be using our product and service, the more better our product and service can is able to resonate with them. And that means that we need to understand their story and their backstory
James Royal-Lawson
I love this – Storylistening, not just storytelling.
Anna Dahlström
No, absolutely.
Per Axbom
Oh, yes, exactly. Yeah
Anna Dahlström
a big part of storytelling is actually being a good listener as well. It’s incredibly important. You know, I talk about that towards the end of my book as well. We’re about kind of storytelling in the workplace that it’s a lot of the time is understanding just as we do with with users, we need to understand the audience that we’re presenting things to, we need to understand what resonates with them. That’s about listening.
It’s about taking in what what they will pay attention to and what will make them come, close their ears and speak and not pay attention. So good storytelling, being a good storyteller is about being a good listener. It’s back in the days to people who were good storytellers. They knew how to adapt the story to the audience in questions, they can kind of look at the audience and see based on their reactions if they should, up the comic level a bit or if they should downplay things, and that’s very much about what we need to do today as well. both online and offline.
Per Axbom
That is so great. And a great note to end on as well. I’ve had so much food for thought. This, this interview itself will be a great story for me to tell others about today and going forward. So thank you so much, Anna.
Anna Dahlström
Thank you. Welcome. Thank you for having me.
[Music]
James Royal-Lawson
I do really like Anna’s idea about doing happy journeys, but also doing unhappy journeys. I remember me and you, Per, when we attended her, one of the prototypes of her workshop, a couple of years back when she ran it here in Stockholm. And we talked about the happy journeys and unhappy journeys.
That stuck in my mind back then as well that it felt quite easily to apply… easy to apply – that if you’ve done some journey mapping and you’ve done some of the exercises that we often would do, we’d worked up our way throguh as part of projects, then, you know, doing another loop through it, but saying, Okay, what happens if it’s not as successful if it’s not as happy so it’s what happens if it’s the worst case scenario and working it through I think all of us could do that. It doesn’t much. You don’t need to be so advanced in your narratives and storytelling abilities within the project of how mature you are in that aspect of things to pull off an unhappy journey.
Per Axbom
Yeah, exactly, then you can also use that to help you predict what can go wrong so that you can mitigate any negative impact before it happens. That’s a really good tool for that.
James Royal-Lawson
I think it’s, it also makes me think about my honest example about Facebook, serving up old memories and updates and so on. And it’s realised about how s**t a story, Facebook is. Just like, it’s a really messed up narrative. And I hadn’t really thought about as far as how messed up the narrative is and realising while I’ve been talking to Anna that one of the reasons why that narrative so bad now on things like Facebook, and even at times LinkedIn, and Twitter, its that they have got an algorithms.
Per Axbom
Because again, it comes down to… it’s the social media platform deciding this is the story you should see now. And it actually takes away the option for me as a user to choose my own story to actually choose the story that I want to read. And because they’ve decided for me, (yeah)
James Royal-Lawson
So you know, normally this time, when things are in chronological order, then you can still make your own adventure, you can write your own story, because you can look through the updates and say, okay, Per has just written a follow up to that thing you wrote yesterday, or that thing you wrote last week, or, you remember updates from certain people and piece the story together yourself.
Whereas, with these algorithms that throw things at you in the order, it decides, you can end up with weird situations like, you know, here’s our baby girl that’s just been born at 3:53 today. That turns up in your feed before the post saying, Oh God, the contraction just died. We’re on our way to the hospital. So it’s become a really messed up story, because the the baby update got the most likes. And this is the same on all these ones was an algorithm, the algorithm is not serving us, it’s not helping us tell… it’s not only helping our story,
Per Axbom
Right? It’s quite obvious that it’s actually only helping the platform. And it’s it’s promoting engagement, rather than autonomy that the user has given. (Yes) So in the end, I mean, a lot of these tools that they say that they do for us and do for the user, they’re reminding us of past events and bringing them to our attention. They’re doing that at a time when I did not ask for it. And they are bringing content that I may not have asked for or wanted to see again. So they’re really really pushing stuff in my face that I can’t really say I don’t want this.
That said, I know so if someone’s gonna object there are really complicated settings, very deep down that we actually can help you avoid some of these things. But the primary algorithm that James is talking about, you can’t really avoid that. Because most people have so many friends know that this is the way that they have solved having many friends, that you don’t have the timeline anymore to just bring content to your attention that they think will get the most… they think you will most appreciate in the sense that you will stay with the platform for it for longer.
James Royal-Lawson
And I think here volleys, top stories, settings and algorithms they’ve, they’ve turned to… they’ve combined two features, or they’ve put two features against each other as if they are polarities, whereas actually they don’t cancel each other out. Having a summary of what’s happened since you were last. visiting a platform is something interesting in itself, and perhaps even provides a certain story or at least the seeds to stories. But the chronological timeline is a fundamental red thread, as Anna says in the interview and a narrative arc that shouldn’t destroy.
Per Axbom
I mean, what that makes me think of also, when you’re looking at the timeline, sometimes it just jumps as well. You can’t even stay in the same location for a while without the platform actually deciding, no, you should have scrolled by now. So it adds content in front of you, as you’re reading something. And you’re you instantly forget, oh, who was it that wrote that, and you spend time trying to find the content that you wanted to see, to actually…. that was part of your story that you wanted to make? And not their story?
James Royal-Lawson
I think we’ve all been there when you’ve been looking for like something on Instagram, and you wanted to show someone else or tell someone else it and you kind of scrolling down what where is it? It’s not there anymore, because the algorithm has changed its position in your story. So you lose all your hooks. And I think that’s, like Anna says, well, towards the end of the interview is it’s…. we’ve got to…. it’s the user on the other end, it’s their story, understanding their story and their backstory and combining that with ours. Not destroying it with ours.
Per Axbom
Exactly. And also what I really love about what she’s saying is at this point of acknowledging emotions, beyond happiness that you actually realise that people are complete and complicated and stuff happens. And it’s supposed to happen because that’s what life is. So acknowledge that and embrace it instead of trying to avoid it.
James Royal-Lawson
A story arcs. Three arcs. Listening, some good advice there.
Per Axbom
So thank you for spending your time with us. links and notes from this episode can be found on uxpodcast.com if you can’t find them in your pod playing tool of choice.
James Royal-Lawson
Remember, you can contribute to funding the show by visiting uxpodcast.com/support
Per Axbom
Remember to keep moving
James Royal-Lawson
See you on the other side
[Music]
Now that they’re easing locked down restrictions, they’ve said that six of the seven dwarfs can finally meet again.
Per Axbom
So six of the seven dwarfs can finally meet again.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, one of them was not happy.
This is a transcript of a conversation between James Royal-Lawson, Per Axbom, and Anna Dahlström recorded in April 2020 and published as Episode 239 of UX Podcast.