Want people to care about users? Lay out what’s at stake if they don’t

Change is hard, but you must lay out why it’s necessary in a UX story

If nothing is at stake, nobody will care.

That’s one of the first and most critical lessons you must learn to use UX Storytelling.

UX storytelling is often considered an influential tool designers can use to connect with stakeholders and increase buy-in. However, designers often make a few fundamental mistakes before starting their stories, which results in ineffective presentations.

Before learning any story techniques or arranging your slides, you must fully define a single question:

• Why do we need to change the current design?

Don’t try to target everybody: find the authority.

One of the reasons that UX Storytelling is so valuable is that we’re often not the authority in the room.

In Stories Sell, Matthew Dicks, renowned storyteller and business consultant, talks about how his most stubborn clients are people with authority.

They believe that because they have a fancy job title, like “CEO of a Fortune 500 company”, audiences will engage with their dull slide deck and be excited about random statistics or corporate jargon.

Why bring this up? Because many designers present with the same mindset. We act like because we’re the ‘user expert’, everyone should hang on our every word.

We present using the 10-step design presentation framework that we learned in boot camp, which got you an “A” in class, and expect similar results in your organization.

Audiences don’t care what your job title is or if you’re the most powerful person in the room. If you don’t engage with them, they’ll ignore most of what you say.

So the first thing you must do is not “speak to the audience”: if a dozen people are on the call, don’t try to target everyone.

Target a single person who can act on your needs and speak to them.

For example, are you presenting Design recommendations? Target the Product Manager, who can approve and bring those recommendations into the backlog.

Targeting a single person rather than a group is often the first key step in speaking about change. Why? Because you can give the proper context.

Give your target audience context about the current design

Once you’ve nailed down who you’re talking to, the next thing to do is give context, specifically about the current design.

• Was the current design based on a lot of assumptions?
• Was it a rough sketch that got polished into a prototype?

You need to provide this context so your target audience realizes the current design's flaws, limitations, or problems.

If something looks nice, but you mention that “we built this with 0 user input”, it makes it much easier to point out that something needs to change.

On the other hand, if your current design looks high-fidelity and they don’t have this context, you will be starting at a disadvantage. Why? Because they might think, “Well, the design looks fine, so we don’t need to change that much.”

From there, we begin to answer that burning question of “Why does this current design need to change?”

Highlight the consequences of inaction (stakes)

When presenting user findings, many designers treat them like basic information. Our user findings should not sound similar to “20 pieces of trivia about Lord of The Rings.”

Instead, our findings must answer that one specific question: “Why does the current design need to change?”

Why? Because change is hard.

Whether Engineers have already built the current design (that you’re re-designing), or you’ve already talked and shown a design solution, people don’t like having to change.

Whether it’s an Executive who wants to keep 90% of the old design or a Product Manager who only allows changes that take 1 day or less to implement, your target audience often wants to stick with what currently exists.

So, you must ensure that the user findings you present emphasize why it’s necessary to change.

“3/5 users found onboarding frustrating.” sounds like “this is a piece of trivia you should know about.” It doesn’t sound great, but it also doesn’t sound like there’s a need to change.

Ideally, you’d be able to involve some Data in the process, so you could say something like, “3/5 users couldn’t complete onboarding, which might explain our 52% abandonment rate during onboarding.”

Or, this is where we can talk about Product/Business Outcomes, like “If we don’t fix this issue, we won’t reach our Business Goal of 50,000 new user signups by Q3.’

But even if you can’t, saying, “Over half of our users got stuck, trying to complete onboarding. If we don’t fix this, we’re going to see a huge dropoff in user account creation.” highlights why it’s necessary to change.

If you want to learn how to create these statements, check out the Doubtful Stakeholder exercise.

After this, think about the actions we must take as a result.

What needs to change?

After we set up the stakes, we need to offer a design solution. Sometimes, there’s one easy solution that you can point to. Sometimes, it requires further exploration.

However, your presentation must always end with a call to action and some next step.

For example, “Over half of our users got stuck on the 2nd screen of onboarding. If we don’t fix this, we’re going to severely limit the number of active users, which is our business goal. To fix this, I recommend doing X.”

This three-step process of the problem, stakes, and solution isn’t just a UX storytelling formula. It’s what CEOs, consultants, and marketers often use to get audiences to act.

Stakes are necessary for any UX story you want to tell

Nobody wants to read about a main character who doesn’t do much, takes no action, and has no reason to change anything.

This is the problem that I often see designers run into when they try to apply UX storytelling to their standardized 10-part design process.

In an age of tight budgets, tighter deadlines, and AI around the corner, people don’t need information about what users do or don’t like. They need to understand why what currently exists needs to change.

So, to be a more effective design communicator and use UX storytelling, you must lay out what’s at stake. It might seem obvious to you, but your target audience may be missing that context, so they reject what you say.

But bring up what’s at risk, and people will start listening to you.

Kai Wong is a Senior Product Designer and Data and Design newsletter writer. He teaches a course, Data-Informed Design, on becoming a more effective designer using the power of Data.